Give 'em Some Stankeye!

Wave a Dirty Handkerchief

2011-11-07T23:06:00.000-08:00

It feels like this post has been in the making for about four years. Seemingly since the beginning of time, Jonathan Sanchez has been touted by armchair GMs and red-eyed, froth-mouthed message board denizens as the Giants' most valuable trade chip. His strikeout ability and left-handedness seemingly made him an attractive option for teams seeking out pitching help, and the Giants' yearly pitching depth (or perceived pitching depth) seemingly made him expendable.

He wasn't an untouchable star like Tim Lincecum or Matt Cain, he didn't have the upside of Madison Bumgarner, and he wasn't payroll poison like Barry Zito, but his talented arm and cheap price tag clearly made him the team's top trade commodity. So the ever-present rumor had him being traded to some pitching-starved team for a big bat. Literally every offseason or trade deadline since 2006 we'd hear it. Trade him for Prince Fielder! Trade him for Adam Dunn! Trade him for Alex Rios! Oh, wait, no...that was Tim Lincecum.

Well, today it finally happened. Jonathan Sanchez was traded away with a AA non-prospect to the Royals for outfielder and former Braves fan whipping boy Melky Cabrera. After years of speculation that Sanchez had the kind of talent to bring back a big bat in a possible trade, he ended up being dealt for a player who only fit that bill if you replaced the word "bat" with the word "waistline". Cabrera is coming off a very good year at the plate, but before 2011 he was a fourth outfielder and he's no one's idea of an impact offensive player.

This trade has sparked a controversy almost from second the reports started to leak out this morning. The reaction from a lot, if not the majority of, Giants fans has been one of scalding hatred. Twitter has been ablaze all day with recurring bursts of invective, all in 140 characters or less, and if the general consensus on Twitter is wrong, I'm not sure I want to be right. This trade is loathed, and most fans are questioning why a pitcher who put up a 3.07 ERA and struck out over 200 batters just a year ago could only bring back a crappy second division outfielder.

First things first. I don't hate this trade, and at the risk of appearing either contrarian or outright dimwitted, especially in the eyes of fellow Giants fans, I actually kind of like the deal. I'm not in love with Melky Cabrera, and I wish, as do we all, that the Giants could have received a better player for our friend Dirty, but I don't think the team got shafted at all. One thing this morning's deal has done though, is put me in the totally unexpected and alien position of actually defending Brian Sabean.

Let's take a step back for a moment and try to assess Jonathan Sanchez's actual trade value. Some people see a relatively young strikeout artist and solid number three starter coming off of a subpar, injury-plagued year. Perhaps his poor performance was caused by his injury, and he is primed for a comeback this season. Me? I see a totally inconsistent, 29-year-old walk machine with exactly one truly good season on his resume and who now has an injury history.

I've always been concerned about Sanchez's ongoing battles with the evil base-on-balls monster but last season the walks just became untenable. Sanchez had always walked a lot of batters, but not an ungodly amount, and he'd always been able to get away with the wildness by being stingy with giving up hits. In 2011, though, his BB/9 rate shot up to a horrific 5.9. Unless your name is Nolan Ryan, you just can't survive that way. Sanchez's problem with walks meant that he was utterly incapable of working deep into games (just two of his nineteen starts lasted seven innings!). This created a huge burden for the bullpen and made Sanchez's starts just unwatchable in general.

If you look at the history of pitchers who last a long time in the league, you'll see that generally their control improves as the years pass. The aforementioned Nolan Ryan is just one example. Sanchez, again, saw his walk rate skyrocket, and with his general history of bad control, that's a horrible sign (the elevated walk rates were evident before his injury, before you go playing that card). Even his strikeout rate dropped a little, and now he's coming off of an arm injury and due to make somewhere around $6 million in 2012. Opposing front offices, even bad ones, aren't exactly chomping at the bit to trade for a pitcher like this, so why in the world do people still think Sanchez could bring an All-Star or anything even close back in a trade?

There's an old axiom, coined by Branch Rickey (supposedly), that it's better to trade a player a year too early than a year too late. I believe this is what's going on here and I give Brian Sabean credit because I think he sees what I do. I've given up all hope that Sanchez will ever reign in his control problems and I think he's done being an effective pitcher. Call me reactionary if you want, but 2010 is looking like the fluke, not aught eleven. The incredible spike in his walk total, the injury, and the fact that pitchers at his age generally don't magically discover the strike zone all combine to scare the hell out of me. I think the walks and high pitch counts and early exits are going to cause too much wear on his arm, and I think, unfortunately, that it's all downhill from here for Sanchez.

Cabrera is out-of-shape and is, by all metrics, an atrocious center fielder. His surprisingly good season with the bat could have also been a total fluke. It's absolutely possible that I could look like a complete blithering idiot in a year as Melky is DFA'd in July and Sanchez wins the AL Cy Young. Hell, I've looked like an idiot before, believe you me.

I think the opposite is true here, though. I think Sanchez has very little left in his arm and I think the Giants just got decent value for him now because they wouldn't have gotten anything for him after this season. Pitchers with his extreme command issues don't last long, and now that he's an injury risk, I think it was fair to bid adieu. Count me as maybe the only soul on the Internet who has this opinion, but I think that, in the end, the Giants are going to come away winners in this deal, and it won't be close.

Game Five Thoughts: Bring Out the Wacky

2011-10-25T19:32:00.000-07:00

Okay, children, what did we learn from last night's game? If your answer is anything but that the hit and run play is an awful, antiquated, and thoroughly debunked baseball strategy that will kill you...well, you flunk Stankeye 101. Now go sit in the corner and wear a funny hat.

The hit and run stinks. I've angrily spoken out against its implementation for years, and for the sake of brevity I'll simply link to this piece I wrote for Bugs and Cranks instead of regurgitating that old rant again. I don't like the play under any circumstance, really, and I think the potential benefit (first and third, avoiding double play) is vastly outweighed by the potential for harm (making good hitters swing at bad pitches). Does it make sense to anybody, though, to employ the hit and run with Albert Pujols at the plate and a runner who has stolen five bases in 119 major league games breaking for second?

This happened not once, but twice, last night, and it absolutely killed the Cardinals. Pujols, obviously, is probably the best hitter in baseball, but Tony LaRussa effectively neutered him by sending Allen Craig in both of his at-bats. The first caught stealing effectively took the bat out of Pujols's hands, as the Rangers immediately walked him intentionally. The second forced him to swing at a bad pitch and strike out. There was some speculation that Pujols has the ability to call the hit and run himself and this is exactly what happened, but if he has the authority to make those kinds of decisions, why don't the Cardinals just make him manager?

--Some quick facts about Marc Rzepczynski.

1. His name is impossibly hard to spell.

2. He put up some amazing peripheral numbers in Toronto's minor league system, featuring more than a strikeout an inning and insanely low home run numbers. In 2008 at AA, he gave up just two homers in 121 innings, and struck out 124. These numbers led one Paulie Rice to believe he was the next great fantasy baseball find, and the ensuing waiver wire antics ensued.

Of course, it wasn't to be, as Rzepczynski's peripherals all took a dive when he got to the majors, and some truly bad mechanics led to his ouster from Toronto and an exile to seeming eternal LOOGYdom.

3. He should never, ever, ever, ever, ever be allowed to face a right-handed hitter in a bases loaded situation in a key spot in a World Series game. Whether it was just an epic brainfart on Tony LaRussa's part or if his bullpen really couldn't hear the call to get Motte up, leaving Rzepczynski in to face Mike Napoli last night was one of the worst blunders you'll ever see in a big game.

--One more reason to root against the Cardinals: Chris Carpenter is a giant, braying ass with a creepy neckbeard. I mean, what is this? Not to mention, it was likely directed at Stankeye fave Mike Napoli. Not cool, dude. Not cool.

Game Three Thoughts

2011-10-22T12:07:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure there's anything more surreal than spending a Saturday morning watching replays of old NBA playoff games while The Cure plays in the background, but it seems like the appropriate atmosphere for a guy about to discuss the prospect of Kyle Lohse starting a World Series game.

The last time Lohse faced American League hitters on a regular basis, it was 2006, and he was quickly being run out of Minnesota as his ERA climbed into the upper atmosphere. A trade to the National League and a few years under the wing of Dave Duncan have led to a minor career resurgence, but, really, is this a guy you want starting a pivotal World Series game, in a hitter-friendly ballpark, against a lineup full of mashers? What if this series goes the full distance to a Game Seven? Does Lohse get the ball then? As a Giants fan who has sight of Livan Hernandez in 2002 burned into his retinas, I'm horrified for Cards fans.

This World Series bears absolutely zero rooting interest for me, besides maybe for drunken gambling purposes. The first two games have been entertaining, close, and well-played, so I'm essentially rooting for good baseball. If nothing else, all I ask is for the two World Series representatives to represent the sport well by not playing embarrassing, sloppy ball. After the ugly NLCS and the sight of the Brewers kicking the ball all over the baseball diamond, I'm in desperate need of some on-field competence. Luckily, Games One and Two have provided just that.

Reasons for rooting for the Rangers? They're a generally likable group of players, and the franchise has never won a title. Plus, Mike Napoli. Reasons for rooting against? Having to look at George W. Bush's ever-present mug in the stands during each game in Texas, and the strangely perverse desire to see the Rangers turn into baseball's answer to the Buffalo Bills.

Reasons for rooting for the Cards? I'm generally a National League guy, and they're the underdog. Reason for rooting against? They're basically a mediocre team that snuck into the playoffs because the Braves crapped their season away and they can thank the general randomness of the postseason for even being in this position. Also, their reputation as a bunch of whiners is fully justified.

If nothing else, I can make a completely uneducated prediction, and then root for me looking smart in a week. Rangers in Six.

Rise of the Napoli

2011-10-21T18:47:00.000-07:00

The transformation of Mike Napoli from Three True Outcomes curiosity into MVP-caliber masher on a World Series team has been one of particular interest to me, since I've been trumpeting Napoli's cause like a fanboy goon since he first came up. Back in 2006, before a lot of fans knew who this guy was, I thought of Napoli as a neat personal find, a guy who, based on my conclusions as an armchair scout, would turn into a nice slugging catcher when offense at the position was scarce. He turned into just that, of course, but there were some bumps along the way, and this season's monumental breakout has surprised even his most rabid backers. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought this guy was capable of putting up an OPS over 1.000 and basically turning into his team's MVP.

My strange fixation with Napoli dates back to one Saturday in 2006, when I watched him bash a long home run in the Game of the Week (to the awe of whichever horrible announcers FOX had doing that game). It took me about five seconds to run to my trusty Baseball Prospectus to see who this guy was. I hadn't ever heard of him, but he was generally seen as a decent catching prospect with big power but major questions about his defense and ability to make contact in the major leagues. To wit: in 2005 at AA he had bashed 31 homers, but with a high strikeout rate and a low batting average. I was easy to see why some scouts were skeptical.

However, during the days of my baseball nerd life where I was overly hung up on players with insane walk rates, regardless of how well they made contact or if they could actually hit. Perhaps I was drunk on the post-Moneyball Kool-Aid, but I loved any player with high walk and power rates, and I was convinced I'd found a hidden gem in Napoli. Naturally, being the type of person who puts fantasy baseball ahead of other, actual constructive things in life, my next move was to immediately snag Napoli off waivers in my keeper league, and wait for my stealth find to bear fruit.

In his rookie year, Napoli essentially fulfilled my Three True Outcomes-centric expectations. He hit .228/.360/.455 with 16 home runs and a whopping 90 strikeouts in 325 plate appearances. The power and the walks would have made the Gene Tenace/Mickey Tettleton crowd do a backflip. My own perverse reading of the situation was that his strikeout totals and low average would hide his true value, so I could reap the hidden value of his bat for years to come, with none of my leaguemates any the wiser. However, in retrospect, if he had kept that lack of contact skill up after 2006, I think his career would have fallen into the Kelly Shoppach trenches.

While Napoli was generally impressive with the bat in '06, his rookie year saw the beginning of a disturbing trend, that being his losing playing time to teammates who couldn't hit if they were playing a life-sized game of Whack-A-Mole. Before Jeff Mathis came along with his own brand of historic offensive impotence, Napoli was stuck in a time-share with Jose Molina, a genuinely great defensive catcher who could generally be mistaken for a pitcher when he had a bat in his hand. Since Napoli provided a lot of value with his bat, and since Molina was, and always had been, an automatic out, this situation was obscene. What kind of crazy person would willingly cost his team wins by playing inferior players over Napoli? Enter Mike Scioscia.

No one, I think, would ever call Scioscia a bad manager, but this particular blind spot was galling for Napoli fans. The problem was that Scioscia was a catcher in his playing days, and he valued catcher defense to the point where, well...he was willing to give Jeff Mathis nearly 300 at-bats in a season. Napoli was never seen as a good defensive catcher in the minors, and there was a lot of speculation that he'd be moved to first base eventually. The defensive numbers over the years seemingly prove this, but whether or not his defensive struggles were exaggerated, Scioscia never took a shine to him, and always seemed to be looking for reasons to give playing time to vastly inferior players.

In 2007, Napoli began what would essentially turn into an annual battle with injuries, and missed some time in the summer. While he essentially kept up the same slugging and on-base rates as in his rookie season, something magical happened: he cut down his strikeouts. By dropping his strikeout rate to 24% (down from nearly 28% the previous year), he was able to put more balls in play and raise his batting average. He was still a work in progress, but it was a step in the right direction.

2008 was when the breakout came, and Paulie cheered and yelled neener-neener to those who had doubted him. Napoli rode a scorching hot August and September (seriously, look at this) to a final line of .273/.374/.586. He then bashed two home runs against Boston in the playoffs, and it looked as though my strange faith in him was completely justified. Here was the year I had envisioned. Lots of power, lots of walks, a strikeout rate in control, and a status as a top-hitting catcher in baseball. Now if only I hadn't traded him for Jorge Posada's corpse in the fantasy league the year before. Live and learn, I guess.

Napoli's big time 2008 season seemed to cement his status as the keeper of the title of Angels Starting Catcher. It shouldn't really take a .960 OPS to wrest an everyday job from the likes of Mathis and Bobby Wilson, but Napoli could never seem to please Scioscia enough to just give him the lion's share of the time behind the plate. Sure enough, as the sun set on the 2009 season, there was Napoli, still stuck in a bizarre platoon with Mathis, whose lack of a bat was starting to reach comic proportions (well, maybe not for Angel fans).

Napoli's 2009 was a downgrade from the previous season, but his .842 OPS still represented, I felt, a reasonable approximation of what one could expect given his skill set. By this time, my walks/strikeout infatuation was wearing off and I was glad to see that, even though Napoli wasn't the on-base machine that I had envisioned, he had turned into a darn good hitter, especially for a catcher. Even in my TTO-induced haze in 2006, I would have been happy that Napoli had turned into this player.

Well, in 2010, with more playing time came major disappointment. Napoli again began the year in a time-share with Mathis, and it appeared to be business as usual in Angel Town. However, on May 29 came one of those freak occurrences that can change the fortunes of a franchise for years to come. Kendry Morales, LA's slugging first baseman, blasted a game-winning grand slam against Seattle. In the celebration at home plate, Morales broke his leg, ending his season, and the Angels were suddenly without a first baseman. Instead of filling the void externally, the Angels simply shoved Napoli into the position.

Making Napoli the de-facto first baseman seemed to be win-win. The Angels, ever-eager to get Napoli's glove away from the catching position, could leave him in the lineup at a position where defense didn't matter so much. Conversely, Napoli now wouldn't have to worry about spending half the time on the bench and could now let his bat do the talking in a full season's worth of AB's. What could go wrong?

Sadly, despite a career-high in homers, Napoli's bat regressed in almost every other aspect, and his strikeout rate, which had declined so impressively since his rookie season, suddenly shot back up. More disturbing was his sudden hacktastic mentality. The trait that had first caught my eye, his ability to draw walks, now seemed to be diminished. Maybe the Angels' contact-happy franchise mentality got to him, or maybe he just decided to start swinging more on his own, but 2011 saw a decline in walks and a career-low OBP, and an overall drastic decline in value. The complete package added up to something other than an adequate first baseman, and it looked suddenly like this particular light had begun to burn out.

By this point, with Scioscia's distrust of him reaching absurd proportions and Morales's return supposedly imminent (he actually would never return), it appeared Napoli's days in Los Angeles were numbered. With the Angels apparently willing to hold their breath and pray that Mathis could pull a replacement level year out of his backside, GM Tony Reagins traded Napoli to the Blue Jays for the right to pay Vernon Wells his abominable contract. This is the kind of deal only made by a man seemingly hell-bent on driving his franchise into the second division for the next decade; baseball analysts everywhere were aghast. The trade looked awful even at the time, but now it looks twice as insane after Wells put up an astonishingly low .248 OBP in 2011 and Napoli went crazy with the bat.

Napoli, of course, was immediately swung by Toronto to LA's division rival, the Rangers, where he had the kind of year that is solely designed for players who want to rub it in the face of the team that traded them. Napoli's .320/.414/.631 line would have put him high in the running for MVP if he hadn't gotten hurt at midseason, and even with the missed playing time, I'd argue that he was the most valuable Ranger. The upgrade from the string of Bengies and Teagardens of 2010 to Napoli helped offset the loss of Cliff Lee and vaulted the Rangers to their second straight AL pennant. Meanwhile, the Angels got to pay Vernon Wells $23 million and watch playoff baseball under the constant bombardment of "Big Bang Theory" promos.

Napoli homered in Game One of the World Series and is close to capping off a season for the ages. Never, even in my craziest, most optimistic projection of Napoli as a hitter would I have predicted a year like this. The Ballpark in Arlington may have had something to with his monster year, but he actually hit slightly better on the road. So when Napoli comes to bat in the next few games of this World Series, look at him batting there and remember, that there he is, justifying the amatuer scouting opinion of a baseball dweeb simply trying to gain an edge in his fantasy baseball league.

Revenge of the 10-Year-Old, A's-Hating Paulie

2011-05-23T23:49:00.000-07:00

The Giants swept their Bay Area counterparts in three games this weekend, with all games pitchers duels, and two walk off victories. This means that the A's have lost nine in a row in San Francisco, which some could interpret as symbolic of how the Giants are dominating the Bay Area in all aspects these days. If you will allow me a brief moment of missing tact...

Hahahaha, A's! Sweep! Defending World Champs! Sweep! No ballpark! Crowds of 5,000 nightly! We own San Jose! Kevin Kouzmanoff! HAHAHAHAHA...

Ahem. Sorry about that. I'm sure that little bout of schadenfreude will come back to bite me in the ass next month when the Giants roll into the Oakland Coliseum and stumble around for three games, as they have a tendency to do. You see, when I was a young baseball fan growing up in plastic cleats and stirrups, I just hated the A's. Nowadays, I don't care about them that much, and I even root for them often, but when the Giants play them and beat them, some of the old A's-hater in me rears his ugly head.

The Giants were lucky enough this weekend to run into a team with an offense crummier than theirs. The Giants haven't been doing much hitting, but the A's make their lineup look like the 1982 Brewers. Oakland's starting first baseman is slugging .285. .285! Daric Barton is bound to hit for a little more power as the year goes on, but that kind of anemia is typical of basically the entire A's lineup. Their three big offensive additions, Josh Willingham, Hideki Matsui, and David Dejesus, have all been busts so far. It's little wonder that Tim Lincecum cut a swath through their lineup while barely breaking a sweat.

As for the Giants, they've been winning despite their offensive ineptitude, but I doubt they can stay on top of the NL West if they can't get the bats going. They have a shiny 27 wins now, but their Pythagorean record is a less impressive 23-23. That isn't surprising given that every single win has seemingly come in the ninth inning on a bloop single or a Colby Rasmus Little League mishap.

The disparity in actual record to Pythag record is due mainly to the fact that the Giants have won a ton of one-run games this season. Yes, I realize that some of that is due to the good pitching and the solid bullpen work so far, but most of it is due to plain old dumb luck. Take the Oakland series. If a few breaks went the A's way instead of the Giants, then the good guys could easily have lost two of three. Like if perhaps Grant Balfour had decided to not throw a challenge fastball right in Nate Schierholtz's wheelhouse.

All of the walk off wins are fun (the Giants have won a ridiculous seven games in walk off fashion), but a team can't sustain success like this, I'm sorry. At some point you have to score some damn runs and win games like normal people. When is Panda coming back? Argh!

--How unlikely was Schierholtz's game-tying homer yesterday? For starters, it was only the thirteenth of his career. Secondly, it was off of a guy who barely gives up any home runs at all (26 in 295 career innings for Balfour). Lastly and most amazingly, it was the first time Schierholtz had actually hit one out of Mays Field since his first career home run. That's right, coming into the game, all but two of Schierholtz's career homers came on the road, and one of those hit in San Francisco was an inside-the-parker. Schierholtz hadn't hit one over the Mays Field wall since doing it in 2008, making yesterday's dramatic home run even more unlikely and awesome.

--Ryan Vogelsong started on Friday and pitched well. Again. We're roughly a month into his improbable comeback and I can't believe I'm stringing those words together. Bad memories of Ryan Sadowski fly like evil spirits at a seance, but Vogelsong has yet to falter. Where once he was simply a punchline to dangle in front of weeping Pirates fans, now Vogelsong has charged in to the rotation like a bull and is challenging Bruce Bochy to make some very tough decisions once Barry Zito is healthy.

So is The Vog for real? No clue. Not a whit. Chris Quick at Bay City Ball gives it a go at explaining Vogelsong's sudden success, but it appears even Pitchf/x may be baffled. Perhaps this is just one for the X-Files crowd, a mystery for those who like to obsess over Cold War conspiracies involving the Russians and a spaceship full of deformed children. Some things just can't be comprehended by man. Next thing you know, we'll see a 32-year-old career minor leaguer suddenly blossom into an All-Star-caliber center fielder and become a key cog on a Giants World Champsionship team. Hey, wait a minute...

--Not to pile on the A's here, but closer Brian Fuentes, who was tagged with the loss in Friday night's thriller, now has an insane seven losses. He's a reliever. And it's May. That ain't good. Oh, and now he's bitching, too. This could get very interesting.

--Darren Ford needs to hit enough to have a career, only so we fans can be endlessly entertained by the tracks of fire that follow him when he motors around the basepaths. That is all.

The Not-So-Great Timmy Debate

2011-05-16T22:24:00.000-07:00

Did Bruce Bochy leave Tim Lincecum in too long tonight? Yes and no. We can debate it until the cows come home, I suppose, but the ultimate decision to leave him in turned out to be a disaster. If you watched tonight's brutal loss to Colorado you saw Timmy cough up a 4-2 lead, having been left out to rot with his pitch count eclipsing the 110 mark in the sixth inning. Whether he was gassed or not, the Rockies jumped on him, lighting him up for five runs, culminating in a three-run home run by Carlos Gonzalez.

The fact that Lincecum was even facing Gonzalez was a point of controversy following the game. Personally, I would have pulled him for Jeremy Affeldt on the spot. Lincecum looked out of whack and his pitch count was getting ugly fast. He'd been walking batters and had generally been looking shaky for the past few innings, and I would have pulled the trigger.

Of course, this is why Bruce Bochy gets paid the big bucks to make decisions like these instead of second-guessing pricks like me who rave about it in their underwear at hideous hours of the night. Credit Bochy with at least giving a reasoned argument after the game for why he left Lincecum in. Bochy stated that he felt that Lincecum was still throwing the ball well and had his good stuff, so he thought he could get Gonzalez. Plus, he's the ace and, as Mike Krukow said on the air, when you win two Cys and close out a World Championship, you get a big leash.

Fair enough. I guess the counter-argument would be that Lincecum clearly (in my view) looked like he'd had it and should have been pulled for a lefty. It's early in the season still and, with his pitch count rising, I think the team still should be somewhat cautious about extending him in a game like this, ace or no. Then again, if Lincecum strikes CarGo out and the Giants go on to win, then Bochy looks like a genius and no one cares. Such is the nature of baseball. After Bochy's terrific postseason machinations last year, he's earned the benefit of the doubt in these situations.

--Nate Schierholtz hit another bomb today to temporarily give the Giants the lead. Schierholtz has been a guy I've been rooting for for a long time now. He's one hell of a fielder with a rocket arm and good baserunning skills. The only knock, and it's a big one, is that he doesn't hit enough to merit a role as anything more than a defensive replacement.

With injuries and Pat Burrell's sudden decision to harken back to his Tampa days, Schierholtz has found some more playing time and, wouldn't you know it, he's actually hitting. When he plays right field next to Andres Torres and Cody Ross, it's one of the best defensive outfields you'll see in the game today. Those three almost negate fly balls completely. It's an amazing thing to watch, really. If Schierholtz can continue to his just .280 with the occasional long ball to keep pitchers honest, he'll force Bochy to get him more time, and Giants pitchers will have the benefit of having that defense behind them more often.

-The Giants' win on Saturday degenerated into a hilarious bout of wiffle ball-style antics, and the result was one of the ugliest looking victories in Giants history. With horizontal rain whipping around for hours, there was no reason the game should have been played, but the Giants scratched out three ill-begotten runs and somehow came away with a victory.

Ryan Vogelsong got credit for the first complete game shutout of his career when the game was called after six innings. He was likely helped by a windstorm that would have taken a cannon to hit a home run in. The Cubs gave away two runs by throwing a slippery ball all over the field. Duane Kuiper apparently said that in all his years in baseball those were the worst weather conditions that he'd seen a game played in. Yeesh. Beautiful stuff only because the Giants won.

Survival of the Freakiest

2011-05-04T22:38:00.000-07:00

It's a tough task to eke out wins on the road when your team resembles a MASH unit, but the Giants have been able to do just that, beating the Mets in the first two games of their series in New York, and suddenly turning this into a decent road trip. Of course, it helps when you have a pitcher capable of turning major league hitters into crying children.

Tim Lincecum provided all the ammo tonight with his right arm, striking out twelve Mets en route to a shutout win. The Giants blooped and blorped a couple of runs together to make Timmy's brilliant pitching stand up. All of these injuries have pressed backup players like Mike Fontenot and Nate Schierholtz into larger roles. Not ideal, of course, but to their credit they've stepped up, with my Totally Random Moment being when Schierholtz launched a mammoth upper deck home run in Coors Field two weeks ago.

I was starting to worry a bit about Timmy a little, to be honest. Despite a nice start against Washington, he had walked six Braves batters the start before and had walked three in seven innings before that. I checked the box score for today's game briefly at work and saw that Lincecum had already walked three batters in two innings. The sudden lack of command was worrying me.

Naturally, my fears were abated in a hurry. Lincecum didn't walk a batter for the rest of the game and cruised through seven innings. The pitch total of 127 is eye-opening, but I think Giants fans in general are through fretting about such things. Two years ago, the entire fanbase would have been ready to crucify Bruce Bochy for letting Lincecum throw so many pitches in just seven innings, but these days everybody figures Timmy can handle a high-pitch outing here and there.

The good from the last two games: Aubrey Huff, who looks like he is finally getting his bat back in order. Darren Ford, who is a joy to watch on the basepaths. I hope to goodness this guy hits enough to hold a job in the majors, because he's a lot of fun. Brian Wilson also wins kudos for a string of gritty saves. After a rocky first few appearances, I think we can safely say The Beard is back!

The bad: Buster Posey is struggling, but I think he's also running into a lot of bad luck. His BABIP is .289, a mite below average. Cody Ross looks awful right now, but hopefully this is attributable to his injury. Miguel Tejada...well, need I say more? It's the Miguel Tejada Pissing On Blog! Subscribe now!

Catching Up...With Injuries!

2011-05-02T23:52:00.000-07:00

There's nothing like a weekend of watching your favorite team make the pitching staff of the Washington Nationals look like that of the 1971 Orioles. Sadly, the Giants spent the last four days hitting feeble grounders and weak pop ups, as pitchers like Jason Marquis and Tom Gorzelanny made mincemeat out of them. The Giants are 3-4 on the current road trip, but how they've won the three, I'll be damned if I can explain. Darren Ford's crazy speed was responsible for the one win in Pittsburgh but the other two victories came mostly because the Pirates and Nats had sudden episodes of self-destruction in single innings.

The team has a legitimate excuse for much of the offensive ineptitude, however: half the bloody roster is seemingly on the DL. Pablo Sandoval, heretofore the team's best hitter in 2011, suddenly broke a bone in his hand and will be out for a month. The team's leadoff hitter, Andres Torres, has been out for three weeks. Mark Derosa is back on the shelf with a wrist injury, in perhaps the least surprising news story of the year. Cody Ross missed the first three weeks of the season and looks totally out of whack at the plate. Aubrey Huff...well, he's not hurt, but he's sucking to such a tune that the wags that called his 2010 a fluke are starting to chirp a little louder.

In one of my previous barely-coherent posts on here, I mentioned that the number one threat to a Giants repeat is injury. Lo and behold, the Giants are being bombarded by a deluge of broken limbs and strained calf muscles to start 2011. Last season the Giants avoided major injuries to all of their key players (unless you count Derosa, which I don't). Now they have so many that we're back being subjected to the sight of Emmanuel Burriss on the major league roster. Is this the price we have to pay for winning a championship?

The obvious answer to all this would be to just ride out the storm and wait until the entire team gets healthy. That's when the real run at the West will begin, right? Er...right? The only problem is that some of the injured players, like Torres and Derosa, are in their 30's, where nagging injuries start to become major problems. Sandoval's injury seems flukish, but remember that this isn't exactly a team of strapping young go-getters. There's a lot of gray hair in the lineup, and these types are susceptible to injury and decline. Of course, if you've been a Giant fan for the past decade, you don't need me to tell you that.

Take Barry Zito, who is on the DL now. He's soon to be 33 and coming off of 11 straight seasons in which he's averaged about 200 or so walk-filled innings. Even for a guy with good mechanics and no significant injury history, that's a lot of mileage, and it's not out of the ordinary to see a relative soft-tosser like Zito completely break down once he dives deeper into his 30's. If this happens, the Giants are out one of the best fifth starters in the game, regardless of ludicrous contract.

Maybe it's just one of those seasons. The Giants, like every championship team, needed just a pinch of luck to run all the way to the gold in 2010. Perhaps a complete reversal of such luck is conspiring to bring them down in 2011.

--I don't mean to turn Stankeye into the Miguel Tejada Pissing On Blog, but man the guy is awful. I, like many a fellow Giants fan, was an extreme skeptic about Tejada's signing in the offseason. It's now a month into the season, and he looks like a player ready for the glories of the DFA line.

Fears of his nonexistent range in the field have proven to be reality and his usual hacktastic ways are even more of a problem because he isn't hitting for the power that he's known for. Well...that he was known for in 2005. Um, why did the Giants sign this guy again? Hey, at least he's not as whiny as I thought he'd be.

--Like a (Vogel)Song. Yeah, there was absolutely no reason for me to headline this blurb, but far be it from me to miss a chance to slip in an idiotic U2 reference. Last Thursday, Ryan Vogelsong returned to the majors to make his first start in the big leagues since (no joke) 2004, the year A.J. Pierzynski was delighting Giant fans with his crotch-kicking ways. Vogelsong pitched well and won the start, making for a nice little story of perserverance. After flaming out with the Pirates completely, he sifted through the minors and the Japanese leagues before making his way back to the mound on that day.

The most amazing thing about all of this, though, is how long it's been since Vogelsong played a role in one of the greatest shaftings of Brian Sabean's career. It seems like only yesterday that Vogelsong was packaged alongside Armando Rios in a trade that brought the Giants Jason Schmidt, but it was ten freaking years ago! Obviously, that trade turned out to be one of the greatest steals in Giants history, as Schmidt became an All-Star while Vogelsong and Rios did very little with Pittsburgh. Now, after all this time, Vogelsong is back in a Giants uni and filling in for Barry Zito. Amazing story, but why do I feel so old?

Two Shots of Sad

2011-04-12T00:09:00.000-07:00

Well, just like Sunday, the pre-game stuff was great, but the actual game was awful. The first game of the Dodger series tonight began as a somber hugfest, due of course to the pregame tribute to the Giant fan who was attacked at Dodger Stadium, and to Juan Uribe's teary return to San Francisco. Uribe came on to the field and received his World Series ring amidst a chorus of "Oooooo"s and the cheerful high-fives of his former teammates. It was an appropriately touching moment dedicated to one of the most unlikely heroes in Giants history. For that brief period of time, we could forgive Uribe for donning the Dodger blue.

Then the game began, and the Giant-Dodger ceasefire quickly collapsed. The second the first pitch was thrown, the usual booing and chants of "Dodgers Suck" soon drowned out any feelings of fraternity. Not that it did any good. The Giants lost 6-1 in a game that was a big bowl of horrid fielding, bad umpiring, and double plays at every turn. Madison Bumgarner again struggled with his command (he wasn't helped by a tight strike zone), and it was all LA basically from the start.

The Dodgers have been dabbling in satanism for a long time now, but Clayton Kershaw is starting to resemble the devil himself when he takes the mound against the Giants. Even though the Giants got some runners on base against him early, those were quickly washed away by double play balls. The endless slew of twin killings enabled Kershaw to run his scoreless streak against the Giants to 23.2 innings. The knowledge that the Giants may have to face this guy four more times this year is horrifying.

Nothing to see here. As Bill James said about Jeff Bagwell..."Pass". Timmy goes tomorrow, and all will be well with the cosmos. Er, we hope.

--I think we have our answer to the age-old question of who gets sent down or released when Cody Ross comes off the DL. While it's completely unfair to judge Brandon Belt based on less than two weeks in the major leagues, I think it's clear that he's the odd man out when Ross returns. The combination of his slow start and the Aubrey Huff/Pat Burrell/Ross positional mishmash probably means that he's destined to get acquainted with the Fresno nightlife in the near future.

In a fair world, Belt would get around 200 plate appearances to prove he's major-league ready, but the Giants are in the business of defending a World Championship and I doubt they are going to be particularly patient waiting for a young hitter to develop right now. No time for this small sample size malarkey!

Not that a demotion would be bad, necessarily. After all, he is only 22 and has only 61 AAA plate appearance under his...er, belt. It's certainly possible that Belt does need more time in the minors. Even considering small sample size fooferah and the vagaries of batting average, I don't think anyone would say that Belt has been unlucky. There haven't been too many line drives coming off of his bat lately, and there have been a lot of weak ground balls. Again, that could be simply due to the quality pitching he's faced so far, but as of this moment, his days with the big club seem numbered.

Then again, he could bash .500 over the next week with four home runs and render everything I've just written completely irrelvant. Brandon, I'd love to be proven an idiot.

--Good news: Pat Burrell is on pace to smack about 50 home runs right now. Bad news: he might hit .180 while doing it. If there's one thing the Giants should be happy to have, it's Burrell's ability to launch the ball over the fence at any given time. Remember also that this guy basically took a low ball deal to stay with the Giants.

Burrell made a horrible defensive miscue in tonight's game that basically ended any chances of a Giant comeback, and that won't be his last impression of a dancing bear in the outfield this season. However, just like last year, the Giants will live with the poor defense, because it's clear they need Burrell in the lineup. Nate Schierholtz can also credit his roster spot to Burrell's ability to rake; few players necessitate a sixth inning defensive replacement quite like Burrell.

Whacked-Out Weekend

2011-04-10T22:30:00.000-07:00

Quick story about Kyle Lohse. Those of you who, like me, have been obsessing over everything baseball since the turn of the century, might remember Lohse as the pitcher who cut his teeth as a solid back-end starter for the Twins just when they began their franchise resurgence. He had a few good years with Minnesota until 2006, when he was run out of town after posting an ERA over seven. Ever since then, he's been putzing around the National League, finding employment mostly as back-end rotation fodder, only occassionally finding effectiveness.

I know everybody hates it when someone rambles on and on about their fantasy baseball team, but I'm going to do it anyway. Back before the 2006 season, I traded two players for Lohse, hoping to solidify my pitching rotation with a decent innings-eater. I had won the league the previous year, and all I asked for from Lohse was 180 or so reasonable innings. Lohse had just come off a season where he posted a decent-looking ERA, but they were backed by awful peripherals, so I should have known better. The league I play in is a keeper league, and thank goodness the two guys I gave up didn't do jack squat in the majors again (one was Bill Mueller), because Lohse basically failed to live up to even my lowly expectations.

Ever since I traded for him, Lohse has had exactly one even remotely good year, in 2008. Otherwise he's been barely league-average to downright awful. I don't know why I was expecting anything more from him than a basket full of sub-mediocrity, but the disappointment still haunts my roto dreams to this day. I ended up dropping Lohse in disgrace last year when his ERA couldn't get under six, a misguided investment come full circle. So as you might have guessed, it was extremely painful to watch Lohse slice through the Giant batting order this afternoon to prevent an Orange and Black three game sweep.

Despite today's disappointment, it was a very good weekend, featuring two games that the Giants miraculously won after being down to their last out. All of the excitement, however, was understandably overshadowed by slew of ceremonies commemorating both the team's World Championship and Buster Posey's Rookie of the Year Award. When Brian Wilson hoisted the Championship flag on Friday afternoon, the goosebumps nearly took complete hold of me. That was scintillating. I probably would have committed some sort of heinous crime to be there that day.

The Giants could have easily been swept this weekend, but thank goodness Ryan Franklin is still impersonating a major league closer. Late-inning heroics were brought to you by Pablo Sandoval, Aaron Rowand, and the formerly-maligned Miguel Tejada, whose bat came alive in the first two games of the series. From the brink came the Giants, teasing us fans by playing poorly, blowing leads, and generally looking dead, only to roar back to victory and remind us why we love this team so much. I'm not sure you can pack much more drama into an entire weekend. I guess it wouldn't have been appropriate if the first couple of games back at Mays Field weren't reminiscent of the torture days of 2010.

I Hate Petco Park, and Other Assorted Rants

2011-04-05T22:30:00.000-07:00

I only caught the last inning of the game today thanks to work, but I didn't really need to see the thing live to know how it was all going to go. The Giants finally found a way to beat the big, bad Petco Park monster in a four-game series last September, but with the new season dawning it's time to hit the reset button on their luck in San Diego's home park. The Giants lost 3-1, and the hope of any late-inning heroics could be counted on to die on the warning track.

The game followed the usual Petco Park formula: the Giants didn't hit at all and the Padres squeaked out a few runs on assorted dinks, doinks, and absurdities. Sure enough, San Diego's three runs came on a sac fly, a bases-loaded walk, and a comebacker that Madison Bumgarner bungled. No hard shots, no towering bombs. Just a bunch of crappy bleeders. So it goes.

The Giants thankfully play just one more game in San Diego on this trip before heading home to face the Cardinals. A win and a split would be nice, but it's Petco here and, honestly, I wouldn't bank on it and I frankly don't really care. I'm just assuming at this point that the season starts when the Giants get back to Mays Field and receive their World Series rings. Everything else thus far has just been exhibition.

--As loathe as I am to recount the ugliness that transpired at Dodger Stadium this weekend, one moment in particular just really turned me into Angry Paulie. In Sunday's game, with the Dodgers leading 7-3 in the eighth inning, the Giants clawed back to within three runs and then loaded the bases for Miguel Tejada. The team had just strung together several very patient, gritty at-bats against Dodger reliever Matt Guerrier. Guerrier wasn't sharp at all and ended up walking the bases loaded. With two outs and Guerrier having control problems, the next batter would probably want to take a strike and not go hacking away at anything, right?

Not in Tejada's mind. Tejada, true to mindless-swinging form, swung away at a first pitch at his shins and popped out to shallow right field. End of threat, and end of game, essentially. End of any hope that Paulie would refrain from breaking several objects when he got home.

Many culprits were to blame for the Giants' series loss this past weekend to the Dodgers. There was Jonathan Sanchez flubbing a routine comebacker to give up a lead. There was Buster Posey striking out with the bases loaded and nearly killing a Dodger fan in the process. There was Aubrey Huff falling down a lot in the outfield. Tejada isn't solely to blame, obviously, but based on his unimpressive showing early on and in the Spring, my skepticism over his ability to contribute looks justified. Swinging away like a clueless doof in that situation certainly didn't do much to change my mind.

-I've said this before on this blog, but it bears repeating in light of recent events. If you're the kind of hopeless degenerate who would actually attack or fight somebody else based upon your allegiance to a sports team, you should probably just swallow the stuff under the sink right now, because there's no hope of you ever being a useful member of society.

This disgusting story is yet another example of pathetic, peabrain morons taking a silly sport way, way too seriously. Obviously not all Dodger fans are lowlifes like the ones that brutally attacked a Giants fan the other night, but it is worth mentioning that this is hardly the first time this has happened at Dodger Stadium. Chavez Latrine, indeed.

Here's hoping for a swift and full recovery for that fan who lies in a hospital bed as we speak. When the Dodgers come into San Fran next week, Giants fans get to show that they are the vastly superior fanbase by refraining from such violence and keeping their taunts limited to some well-timed chants of "Ya Bums!" and the occasional "Dodgers Suck!" Which they do.

Drunk Predictions 2011

2011-03-31T09:00:00.000-07:00

I write here now, in the wee hours on the eve of Opening Day of the 2011 season, World Series commemorative Bluray on TV, geared to Game Five for good luck, and I don't want tomorrow to come. For the first time in my baseball-adoring life, I wanted the offseason to go on forever. Five months of San Francisco Giants as unequivocal World Champions for the first time ever. The longer this offseason went on, the longer it could be before anybody challenged the Giants for the champion title. The joy of October is still fresh in my mind. I don't want to face a future where the Giants aren't the defending champs anymore.
So here I go, being dragged kicking and screaming into the 2011 season. Let the torture begin. Again.

Here are some quick predictions for the oncoming season. You know how this goes. I write a bunch of random numbers down, and come October we can revisit this little post and see whether I look like a baseball genius or a complete, raving ass. Nothing scientific about this. I simply close my eyes, pull some numbers out of my backside, and pretend that there's some process behind this. The fact that I'm not drinking as I write this seems wholly inappropriate.

Look for newly-christened Stankeye fave Cody Ross to have a
shockingly good power year

Here are my projected hitting leaders:

AVG: Pablo Sandoval, .305

R: Andres Torres, 105

2B: Torres, 45

3B: Torres, 7

HR: Cody Ross, 28

RBI: Buster Posey, 95

SB: Torres, 33

BB: Buster Posey, 75

OPS: Buster Posey, .880
Nope, nothing out of the ordinary here. Just your typical, conservative educated guessing, and everything seems reasonable enough. PECOTA would be proud, and I'm sure ZiPS would be too, and...wait, what the hell?!? Cody Ross? 28 homers? Leading the team? You have been drinking, haven't you, Paulie?

That's right, 2011's Completely Insane Giants Prediction has Ross leading the team and setting a career high in jacks. In fact, I was going to pin his total at over 30 before he got hurt. Before you send the men with straightjackets to come get me, let me explain the method to the stark raving madness. Guys like Ross, i.e. guys with legit pop but who have nondescript careers and basically middling overall hitting ability, tend to have That One Crazy Good Year, where their home run total will shoot up. It's a one-year anomaly, like Rich Aurilia's 2001 or Jose Bautista last year. I think Ross is primed to hit a bushel-full of homers this season, while not necessarily being any better of a hitter.

Other than that sad attempt to be provocative, everything else is relatively standard. I think a slimmed-down Panda will get his groove back and push his average into bamboo-worthy territory. I think the revived Torres is mostly for real, although don't be surprised if his batting average dips to .250 under a sea of strikeouts.

Now for the pitching...

W: Tim Lincecum, 21

K: Lincecum, 240

IP: Lincecum, 223

ERA: Lincecum, 2.89

SV: Wilson, 32

As expected, Lincecum dominates the leaderboard, but anybody who has read my little pitching previews (thanks, Mom) already knew that. The shoulder inflammation that bugged Matt Cain terrifies me, so I'm not even predicting him to be more of an inning horse than Timmy.

I'm assuming (praying?) that B-Weezy's stay on the DL will be brief , so his save totals will still be fairly high, if not as gaudy as last year. I'm more concerned that his ability to be a multi-inning reliever might be put in danger by the oblique injury. That willingness and ability to effectively pitch more than one inning in relief is what seperates Wilson from most closers on the planet. I'm also concerned that continued exposure to The Machine will prevent me from being able to keep my lunch down.

OK, deep breath. I'm not sure I'm mentally prepared for Giants baseball yet, but I guess I have no choice. Screw it. Let's do it! Full on, bull rush into the oncoming season. It's less than 24 hours away!

Go Giants! Repeat, baby!

Giants Pitching Preview 2011: The Road Warrior

2011-03-30T23:10:00.000-07:00

Madison Bumgarner 7-6 3.00 ERA 1.31 WHIP 86 K's 111 IP

Madison Bumgarner in 2010...er, possibly minus the foul-tempered mutt.

What was more impressive last postseason? Madison Bumgarner's utter dominance of the Rangers in Game Four of the World Series, or his two-inning relief appearance in front of 46,000 obscenity-spewing Philadelphians in the gut-wrenching Game Six of the NLCS? I think it ends in a bloody draw.

Both performances came in hostile territory in series-turning games and would have made men thirty years his senior wilt with helplessness. His performance against Texas was the height of mastery, but his ability to hold the Phils at bay in the most insanely stressful of circumstances might have saved the Giants' season. The fact that he shrugged off all of that pressure and mowed through two good lineups in baseball's biggest stage, at the age of 20, is unbelievable to me. Those two performances, coupled with his overall dominance in opposing ballparks throughout the season, should earn him the name Road Warrior. Spread it like a chain letter, people!

A year after a mysterious decrease in velocity led to a widespread panic amongst Giants fans, Bumgarner is in the majors for keeps. He's hitting 90 again, he's back throwing darts, and expectations are sky high. After taking over the fifth starter spot for awful Todd Wellemeyer in June, MadBum quickly proved to be a formidable addition to the staff, posting a solid strikeout rate with a surprising ability to limit walks (especially impressive for a player his age; maybe he should give Jonathan Sanchez lessons). The only blemish was a relative hittability; he allowed more than a hit an inning. This could be simple bad luck, though, as his line drive rates don't look particularly abnormal.

The most notable and freakish fact about Bumgarner's 2010 was, of course, his complete dominance on the road...and his bizarre ineffectiveness at home. This trend carried right on into the postseason, as Bumgarner was knocked out of the fifth inning in his lone Mays Field start in the playoffs, but was pretty awesome in his two road starts, plus the relief outing in Philly. Unfortunately, as much as we would love our own mythic loner scouring the apocalyptic landscape to deliver wins, this whole thing screams fluke.

Small sample sizes are just screaming bloody murder here, and pitchers, especially young ones, typically pitch better at home than on the road as a rule. Plus, there's no logical reason for Bum to be so bad at home. The park is relatively pitcher-friendly, especially on fly balls. Maybe he has an aversion to a sea of orange in the stands, I don't know. Fluke, I tell you! Single season fooferah! Expect this bizarre split to normalize this year.

Young pitchers usually have their own adjustment period after finding initial success in the majors. It wasn't as if Bumgarner came up blowing hitters away or anything, so expect some ups and downs in his sophomore season. That said, he's a big guy with a traditional pitcher's build and an easy, sound pitching motion. He's a 21-year-old who just came off a successful rookie season and who chewed through a very good lineup in a series-turning World Series game. There's plenty of reason to be excited here, folks.

Predicted Bumgarner Line: 9-7, 3.88 ERA, 145 K's I expect some bumps in the road, much like Matt Cain saw in his first full major league season. I also think he'll be handled with relative kid gloves. I can't see him being allowed to go more than 170 innings this year, but I've been wrong before. Go, MadBum!

Giants Pitching Preview 2011: Bring On the Dirty

2011-03-28T22:27:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Sanchez 13-9 3.07 ERA 1.23 WHIP 205 K's 193 IP

Before 2010, Dirty Sanchez had been aggravating Giants fans for just about his entire major league career. Upon his arrival in 2006 as a swing starter/reliever, he tantalized us with moments of sheer dominance, giving us visions of a possible third ace to compliment the Tim Lincecum/Matt Cain twin terror that was sure to dominate for years to come. In early 2008, slotted into the rotation for good, Sanchez appeared to have figured it out, until a miserable second half led to more doubts about his future. The next season, he was a no-hitter away from losing his spot in the rotation for good, until that magical night against San Diego made it impossible for Bochy to yank him from the rotation again. He settled down in the second half that year and cruised to a decent 2009 season, but problems with walks led to simply too many early exits. It's hard to be a servicable starter when you can't escape the fifth inning without throwing 100 pitches. In short, Sanchez was a pillar of frustration.

Last season, the Sanchez we had all hoped and dreamed for finally materialized. He dropped his ERA by more than a run, leading the team in fact, and eclipsed the 200 strikeout mark, becoming just the second left-handed starter in SF Giants history to do so. He was also considerably more durable, pitching thirty more innings than in 2009. Combine that with his masterful pitching in the division-clinching final game of the season, and it was a wonderful, breakout year all around.

Yet it was still bloody frustrating. Sanchez is one of the most entertaining pitchers in the game to watch when he's on. The sheer sadistic glee one gets when witnessing batters flail at his nasty slider and deceptive arm angle is one of the joys of Giants baseball. When he doesn't have his stuff, though, he's an absolute frigging nightmare. Sanchez is prone to fits where he has no idea where the ball is going, and that leads to runners peppering the basepaths and early-inning death marches into the clubhouse. Nothing can epitomize the Jekyll/Hyde act that is Dirty Sanchez quite like two of his postseason starts last year. The Good: His 11-strikeout performance against Atlanta. The Bad: his Game Six meltdown against the Phillies, where he had to be pulled in the second inning after showering the bases with runners and then getting into it with Chase Utley.

Such is life with a guy with such a wild streak. Sanchez led the National League in walks allowed last year, continuing a trend that he established from the moment he arrived in the majors. The stat nerdier-types have worn out many a keyboard this offseason pointing out his extremely low .252 BABIP last year, but any major regression can be mitigated by a simple reduction in walks. If Sanchez can cut down on the free passes, it's going to mean less baserunners if those bloopers that were caught in 2010 suddenly start falling in for hits in 2011. Pitching in front of an outfield with Andres Torres and Cody Ross (and occasionally Nate Schierholtz, if he isn't traded) will also help fight the BABIP demon, but walks are the key.

Most pitchers, I think, generally improve their control as they age, mostly through simple maturation, but also because they have to find the zone more as their stuff starts to gradually decline. Can Sanchez reign in his penchant for over-generousity toward opposing batters? The dream scenario is something like Randy Johnson, who was a regular Nuke Laloosh when he first came up, but who gradually evolved into a bonafide control pitcher who could still get batters to whiff with regularity. The nightmare version is Shawn Estes, whose inability to get the walks under control turned out to be his undoing.

About a year or so ago, the hip radio trade chatter involved trading Jonathan Sanchez and his potentially golden arm for a big bat needed to send the Giants to the Promised Land. Now the Giants have reached the Promised Land, without any such trade promoted by beer-drunk KNBR callers, and they sure as hell wouldn't have done it without Dirty. Sanchez is a great third starter who can dominate even the best lineup and makes for a nasty gauntlet for opponents to run when combined with Lincecum and Cain. I just fear that, if he can't eventually get his walk totals down, we won't be able to say that for too much longer.

Predicted Sanchez Line: 12-11, 3.61 ERA, 195 K's I definitely see some regression to the mean for Sanchez in 2011. A good defense and a fly ball-friendly home park will help counter-balance all the walks, but I can't see another ERA threatening to fall below three. Not that that doesn't still make him a very good pitcher.

Injuries, Injuries All Around

2011-03-23T22:48:00.000-07:00

One of the keys to any team having a great year is a certain amount of good luck with injuries. Whenever you see a team roll to 100 victories or to a World Series win, it's a good bet that they stayed relatively injury-free that year. This ability to stay healthy is some parts good conditioning, some parts the work of a good training staff, and most parts plain good luck. Injuries are as much as part of sports as the heroic feats that we watch for, and any time a team goes through a season without a key player getting hurt at some point has been very fortunate.

In this regard, the Giants of last year were laden with shamrocks and leprechauns. The team had only one major position player miss any extended amount of time in 2010 (I'm not counting Mark Derosa, since he was basically a non-factor), and I think it's safe to say that the Giants didn't miss Edgar Renteria much during the regular season. As for the pitching staff, aside from a random Joe Martinez start in June, the Giants had only six pitchers make starts for the team all year, and it was only that many because Todd Wellemeyer turned out to be a steaming pool of suck. With pitchers and their penchant for arm woes, that's almost unheard of in any year. As much as we want to make like the monkeys when it comes to Giant pitchers getting hurt, an injury-free rotation isn't likely to happen again.

So naturally things already appear to be correcting themselves early on this Spring. Cody Ross hobbled off the field in the first inning today with a calf injury, something that didn't look serious at first glance, but an MRI tomorrow could prove otherwise. Ross is slated to be the everyday right fielder, and even though he's not an All-Star, the alternatives out there are worrisome. Suddenly fans are facing the unnerving prospect of another Opening Day with Aaron Rowand in the starting outfield.

The Beard himself, Brian Wilson, has been battling an oblique strain and it's unknown whether he will be ready for Opening Day after he had to cut a workout session short this morning. If Wilson is out, it obviously puts the closer situation in flux, likely necessitating a move of Sergio Romo and his magic slider into the role and creating a negative domino effect throughout the entire bullpen. Perhaps a closer-by-committee will be utilized, but I honestly don't want to think about a world without our favorite epic crazy man on the mound in the ninth inning at this point.

As if that weren't enough, Matt Cain has battled elbow inflammation early on, which is a concern with any pitcher. So two key players already have injuries that could force them to miss extended time, and a third has a nagging hurt that could balloon into a more serious one at a moment's notice. Hoo-freaking-ray.

Are we witnessing the Giants' injury luck evening out with a vengeance right now? Having any of those three guys miss a lot of time is a truly horrifying proposition, but you'd be a fool to think the Giants could go another full year without an injury to a key player. Being able to weather the injuries makes a good team; being lucky enough to avoid them altogether makes a great one. Healthy seasons like 2010 don't happen often, so grab your box of Lucky Charms and pray that lightning strikes twice.

Giants Pitching Preview 2011: DIPS Be Damned

2011-03-21T23:05:00.000-07:00

Matt Cain 13-11 3.14 ERA 1.08 WHIP 177 K's 223 IP

Matt Cain looks to thwart the disciples of FIP again in 2011.

There are those in the world today, people who write about and claim to be the guardians of everything baseball, who still live by the law of Cro-Magnon Man. They worship the God that is the won-loss record, and any high-falutin' statistic that can't be deciphered with abacus in hand they dismiss as pure demonry. These writers still populate the game, and while most are easily put in their place by other scribes of immensely superior talent and capacity for abstract thought, they still rear their heads and rattle their sabres in an increasingly futile battle to defend their devotion to the almighty win.

When Matt Cain put up records of 7-16 and 8-14 in 2007 and 2008, respectively, some local writers began to turn a bit on this former star prospect. He wasn't immediately Roger Clemens, which offended them. Anybody who puts up 16 losses in one year just doesn't know how to win, they said. Yes, the offense around him sucks, the argument went, but he should be pitching to the score, like good old Jack Morris. Soon ridiculous articles were being written about how Cain's low-key demeanor was adversely affecting his teammates' ability to hit. We enlightened fans who knew better simply facepalmed at this sudden new sportswriting turn to the batshit idiotic.

Now, in the aftermath of a World Championship, none of these people are making a peep. Flash forward a few years, and suddenly Cain is magically a gamer. Funny how putting up a zero ERA in 21 postseason innings will silent the critics who say you don't have the grit it takes to win on a major league pitcher's mound.

Cain was a legitimately improved pitcher last season, but it wasn't because he was no longer putting up loss totals in the high-double digits. A penchant for walks and occasional forays into pitch count hell plagued him in his first few years in the majors, but last year he slashed his walk rate, put up the best K:BB ratio of his career by far, and had less grueling starts that led to early exits. He looked primed to set a career-best ERA mark as well, until a horrid final start against San Diego shoved his final tally back over three. Despite this, the improved control coupled with his typical stinginess with hits and the home run ball made 2010 Cain's best season yet.

Despite his popularity with Giants fans, one group that Cain continues to baffle is the statheads. Just about every year of his career now, Cain's final season ERA has outperformed his peripheral numbers and his Fielding Independent ERAs substantially (career ERA is 3.45, career FIP is 3.84). Dictated by the number of home runs and walks he allows, and the number of batters he strikes out (i.e. things he can generally control), Cain should not, if you follow DIPS even remotely, be continuously putting up ERAs in the low threes. He's due for an ERA collapse any year now.

Except it never happens.This ability to consistently beat his xFIP and whatnot has become like the Ghost Car for many stat nerds; they see it with their own eyes, yet they can't bring themselves to accept it. I'm a pretty firm believer in the wonders of FIP and SIERA and whatnot, Cain's career provides a large enough sample size to infer that something else is going on here.

Since Cain's line drive rate has consistently stayed relatively low for the entirety of his career, it's likely that even though he's not striking out a ton of batters, he has a heavy fastball that is hard to put good wood on. He's also a fly ball pitcher in a park that is hard to hit home runs in, so put those together and you have a guy who seemingly can pitch to contact but who also has the stuff to bear down and get a whiff when he needs one. Hey, kind of like a pitcher those old-timey writers shed nostalgic tears over.

When you think of star pitchers, you don't immediately think of Matt Cain. Look at it this way, though. He's a horse who has finished in the top ten in ERA twice, the top ten in ERA four times, and who can give your team 200 strong innings without batting an eyelash. These guys don't exactly come bounding off the scrap heap. Concerns about his workload have begun to pop up this spring as he's battled some shoulder inflammation, so while that type of report has the ability to scare the bejeezus out of a fanbase, it should be remembered that he's inherently an injury risk because he's a pitcher. Caution must always be taken but he's weathered the young pitcher breakdown nexus very well thus far.

Cain would be the ace on a lot of major league teams. He's just entering his peak as a pitcher, but I suspect what we saw in 2009 and 2010 is probably what he is: a top-tier, if unspectacular, starting pitcher who could bust out a Cy Young year if everything breaks right. That he's not the best pitcher on the team speaks volumes about the Giants' pitching staff...and Tim Lincecum.

Predicted Cain line: 15-9, 3.33 ERA, 188 Ks I see Cain suffering a bit of a BABIP backlash in his ERA, but a career high in wins and strikeouts to help offset it.

No Suppan For the Soul

2011-03-15T00:01:00.000-07:00

In the latest edition of "Baffling Washed Up Veteran Spring Invites", we have Jeff Suppan, who was brought into camp to fight for...what exactly? A spot in the starting rotation? Never in hell. A role in the bullpen? Yes, because every team needs a slop-throwing longman to come in during a blowout and throw burning logs into the fire. Is he supposed to act as insurance in case one of the starters gets hurt? Let's just say that if Suppan is making starts for the Giants for any extended length of time, they ain't going back to the World Series.

Suppan got lit up in his start this afternoon against his former team, the Brewers. Not that Spring stats mean anything, but I don't know what the Giants expect to see here. Suppan hasn't been even an acceptable innings-eater since 2007, and he doesn't even merit the title of savvy, soft-tossing control pitcher, since his walk rates have escalated steadily since his days with the Cardinals. If he's around to dispense wisdom to the young pitchers, it's only to tell them how to observe their deadly slow offerings on a flight path to the moon.

Suppan's career is an interesting study in a player who probably got way more out of limited stuff than anyone could have imagined. He started out as a failed prospect with the Red Sox, then was taken by the Diamondbacks in the 1997 expansion draft (his first start as a Dback was against the Giants; it didn't go well). Arizona quickly gave up on him, figuring his homer-tastic tendencies wouldn't serve him well in their bandbox ballpark.

He was scooped up by the Royals, where his career started to gain some traction. Though his ERAs with Kansas City don't look impressive at first glance, when taken in the context of the run-crazy American League of the late-90's/early-aughts, he was actually pretty danged good, putting up an ERA+ over 100 in his each of his first three seasons with the team. How he did that despite a lowly 4.9 K/9 rate is the stuff for Robert Stack and Unsolved Mysteries.

After a solid half-season with Pittsburgh, and then a disastrous second stint with Boston, Suppan landed in St. Louis, where he was swept under the wing of pitching coach/miracle worker Dave Duncan. Utilizing whatever pixie dust that Duncan sprinkles on mediocre veteran reclamation projects, Suppan put up three terrific season with the Cards, and pitched spectacularly in the 2006 postseason, helping the Redbirds to a World Championship. Despite unspectacular peripheral numbers and middling stuff, the halo of a World Series team was now safely fastened over his head, and a big payday loomed. Surely no team could be fooled into shelling out big time cash for his junk ball stylings, right?

Wrong. With the postseason shine still gleaming as he hit free agency in the 2006 offseason, Suppan was rewarded with a four-year, $40 million contract from Milwaukee. Yeah, you don't need me to tell you how that went. Suppan was okay in his first Brewer season but quickly turned into a complete disaster in 2008, becoming a prime example of how not to spend your free agent money, and eventually found himself roaming the NRI wire. Despite the sour end, all in all, a career to be proud of, no doubt.

Now, of course, he's done, and I'm still baffled by why the Giants even felt the need to give him an extended workout in the Cactus League. He doesn't fit anywhere, and I thought we were past the days of the Jamey Wrights and the Russ Ortizes, and the Giants trying to pry long-dead magic from their veteran shells. I guess he can serve some purpose as organizational depth, or as a last-ditch emergency replacement in case of injury. Even so, it seems like if this were the case, the Giants could do better than trust a 40-man roster spot to past-his-prime vet acting as little more than a harbinger of the second coming of Wellemeyer.

Giants Pitching Preview 2011: The Greatest Story Ever Told

2011-03-13T23:21:00.000-07:00

Tim Lincecum 16-10 1.27 WHIP 231 K's 212 IP

The Tim Lincecum-is-Jesus Watch Continues in 2011

One bad month. One unfathomably awful span of five starts in August of 2010. That's all it took to send one rabid fanbase into a hysterical, and possibly homicidal, mess. From the day he set foot on a major league mound, Giants fans everywhere have fretted about how long it would take for Lincecum's lithe frame to cave under the rigors of a full season's workload in the bigs. Pitch count nazis and armchair pitching coaches remained at the ready every time Lincecum took the mound, just waiting for that seemingly inevitable day when Timmy's arm would finally give out. It seemed like it was just a matter of time.

As August 1st dawned last season, it looked like that day might have come. For the month, Lincecum put up an unsightly 7.82 ERA. He gave up more home runs than in any other month, he was a mechanical mess, and his crummy performance had Giants fans everywhere wondering just what in blazes had happened to their ace. With every ensuing bad start, the panic in Giants-land rose to a fever pitch, with frantic KNBR callers sweatily predicting the coming of endtimes and insisting that Lincecum should have been traded for Alex Rios after all.

What was the cause of Lincecum's foray into replacement-level hell? Theories abound. Was it his dicking around with a new windup? Was it bad conditioning? Was he refamilarizing himself a little too much with Dr. Dre's discography? We'll probably never know. Sometimes pitchers just have bad months, and Lincecum's August was sure a stinking doozy. As it turned out, it didn't matter. Not one bit.

When the calendar turned to the ninth month, our long regional nightmare had at long last ended. With his first start in September, Lincecum's Cy Young stuff of old returned, and he ripped off a streak of dominance that didn't end until he tore through the Rangers lineup in the World Series-clinching Game Five. As he inexplicably followed up his worst month as a major leaguer with one of his very best, Lincecum's September ERA was a miniscule 1.94, with 11.2 strikeouts per nine innings. He didn't slow down once the playoffs hit, either, striking out 14 Braves in a complete game shutout in his postseason debut.

Despite the August struggles, Lincecum led the National League in strikeouts for the third straight season and cruised in with a 3.43 ERA, solid for anybody, if not up to Lincecum's usual standards. The whole season was yet another reminder of the immortal words of Ford Prefect. There will always be concerns about Lincecum's workload and his velocity, because heck, pitchers are very unpredictable beings, and we don't want to see one of the best pitchers in Giants history break down because of overwork. Fortunately, Lincecum has made it nicely into his late-20's having avoided the injuries that tend to befall a lot of young pitchers, and his workload has been managed very well, in my opinion.

Refining his nasty offspeed stuff and adding a new slder were apparently the keys to his late-season reawakening. He no longer throws i the upper-90's, as he did when he first came up, but if his changeup is as deadly as it was in the postseason, what does that even matter? Few pitchers can make opposing hitters look foolish like Timmy can, and he's a joy to watch when he's on. Despite his one-month blip last year, there's no reason to expect anything but ace-caliber pitching from Lincecum in 2011.

Now that Timmy is entering his fifth season in the bigs, and with two Cy Youngs and a World Series ring already on his mantle (sheesh), it's fair to ask where he ranks on the all-time list of Giants pitchers. Beside me is a copy of Rob Neyer's essential Big Book of Baseball Lineups (maybe my favorite baseball reference book of all time), and I'm ready to use it. Neyer has Juan Marichal, Gaylord Perry, Jim Barr and Jack Sanford listed as the San Francisco Giants' four best pitchers of all time, in that order (the book was published in 2002, so maybe Jason Schmidt deserves a place there now, but we'll go with Neyer's list).

How does Lincecum match up, just based on four seasons? Behind Marichal and Perry obviously, since those two were no doubt Hall of Famers. However, the only argument Barr can make to be ahead of Timmy would be based on longevity as a Giant, not on pure quality. He was good (and was kind enough to let me interview him for a few articles I wrote as the Sac State baseball team beat writer), but he never put up a season as good as Lincecum's last three and he didn't strike anybody out. Sanford has a couple of brilliant seasons, but was more of an innings-eater than an ace (though he was ace-like in the '62 World Series).

So Lincecum can make a clear claim for the title of third-best pitcher in the history of the San Francisco Giants. Not bad for a guy who hasn't even reached his age-27 season, which many analysts regard as a player's peak. Not only is he historically good, but he's so danged likeable. He doesn't scowl and annoy media members like Randy Johnson. He doesn't denigrate franchise legends like Pedro Martinez. He's a goofy guy with a laid back demeanor who isn't above yelling the occasional profanity on national TV. How could you ask for a better guy to be your star pitcher?

Now excuse me while I enjoy another season watching a once-in-a-generation ace on the mound for the Orange and Black.

Predicted Lincecum line: 21-6, 2.89 ERA, 240 K's. Better run support leads to his first 20-win season and more Cy Young love after a year hiatus.

Bound To Disappoint?

2011-01-24T23:18:00.000-08:00

As things stand now, the Giants are going to be bringing back essentially the same exact team that won the 2010 title, minus one scorned World Series MVP and plus a whinier facsimile. This could be both very good and monumentally bad. Good because it is, of course, the team that rolled to the first World Championship in San Francisco history, the band of lovable misfits that warmed our hearts and brought the city of San Francisco to a complete standstill on parade day. The memories of this team and this season will be engraved in our minds until the end of time, and rightfully so. Screw it, I may name my first kid Bumgarner (as my future wife prepares the divorce papers).

The bad part, though, is that a lot of these guys played completely out of their minds last season. Regression, that dirty, dirty word that all fans of Cinderella teams have loathed since the 1970 Mets finished with just 83 wins, is just waiting to rear its ugly head. A number of Giants players had fluky years, especially in the batting order, and praying for a repeat performance from everybody is like a kid praying for a Ninja Turtle toy to magically appear on the doorstep in the morning (take it from personal experience...it doesn't work).

Let's look at three players the Giants recently signed to one-year deals, enabling them to avoid arbitration: Cody Ross, Jonathan Sanchez, and Andres Torres. While I'm an immense fan of all three of these players, they are shining examples of why we should worry about the Giants next season.

First there's Cody Ross, the wide-smiled outfielder with the robust beard who terrorized the Phillies on the Giants' way to the NL pennant. Ross's main attribute in his limited regular season stint with the team was that he wasn't Jose Guillen. He made a costly misplay in a game against Colorado and he was generally an afterthought after the Giants claimed him on waivers in August. Once the postseason hit though, he turned on the power, became Joe Dimaggio, and now he never has to buy a beer in the Bay Area again.

Ross will be back in 2011 to be the team's everyday right fielder, I assume. His postseason heroics will live on, but it's worth it to remember that when he donned a Giant uniform last season his OBP for the year was .316. His lifetime OBP is .322. That probably isn't what you're looking for in a starting right fielder. He apparently tweaked his batting stance a bit late last season, but who are you going to believe is the real Cody? The guy pwning Roy Halladay in a few at-bats in the playoffs, or the more average-ish hitter gracing the ball field since 2003?

Jonathan Sanchez is the second guy who avoided arbitration, and while it may seem sacrilege to poo-poo a guy who led the team in ERA last season (yeah, that shocked me too), there are a few things to be worried about. First and foremost, his ability to turn any start into an insufferable trip to pitch count hell might have adverse effects on his arm and mind (lest we forget his Game Six meltdown in the NLCS). Second, according to xFIP (it's a pitcher's ERA when...ah hell, just go here), Sanchez was essentially the same pitcher in 2010 that he was the two years before.

That's not bad, necessarily, but it just means his near-All-Star level ERA of last season was driven more by a confluence of BABIP hijinks, good fielding, and plain good luck than by a sudden pitching epiphany by our friend Dirty. If it's true that Sanchez has just been the same old, same old despite the dive in ERA, then it would stand to reason that he's due for some correcting (er, but hopefully not this kind). If Sanchez continues to have control problems (and at this point in his career, I don't see them being ironed out to any great extent), we might be looking at a jump of a full run on his ERA, without much change in actual performance.

Lastly, there's Andres Torres, one of my favorite Giants even from his part-time days in 2009, and now a bonafide immortal thanks to his overall heroics in 2010. Torres is perhaps the most popular regression pick in the nation among baseball stathounds. Anyone not picking Torres to have a downturn in 2011 is likely to be savagely beaten by throngs of numbers-spewing baseball dweebs from around the nation.

Obviously, Torres' late-career breakout, after a baseball lifetime of wandering aimlessly in the minors, is grounds for serious skepticism. So is his eyebrow-raising strikeout rate, which is suspect for a leadoff hitter. Also bringing booze to the big pessimism party is the fact that his awesome year was really more of an awesome four months, as his second half OBP was .303 (though he was terrific in the NLCS and World Series). So, yeah, any roto guru worth half his salt is going to say that Torres has a halfway decent chance of completely crapping out. On the flip side, Torres is so freaking good with the glove and on the bases that he still is probably an above-average player even if his bat sinks to subpar levels.

Why am I coming on here and being a negative prick toward our beloved Giants when they're just two months removed from bringing eternal joy to our black and orange hearts? Why did I decide to post here for the first time in two months only to start hating? Fear not, fair reader, it's not because I'm down on any of these guys. Seriously, I'm happy they're all returning to defend the title and, really, how could you ever not like Cody Ross?

The only thing is, I'm learning for the first time ever that when a team wins everything, sentiment tends to trump rationality. Instead of doing something really bold like nabbing Carl Crawford, the Giants are playing to the emotions of the fans and are bringing the entire team back next year, when a lot of them played above their heads. The fan in me loves it. The smart baseball person in me is a little wary.

The Bat Is Back

2010-12-01T23:13:00.000-08:00

Two immediate reactions upon hearing the news that the Giants had (surprisingly, in my view) re-signed left fielder Pat Burrell to a very team-friendly one-year contract (actual terms haven't been disclosed). One: well, Carl Crawford would have looked really good in Orange and Black, and two: I guess this means we won't be seeing top prospect Brandon Belt in the majors any time soon. I thought that the Giants might be planning to stick the recently re-signed Aubrey Huff in left field to make room for Belt at first base, but I guess that was just wishful thinking by yours truly.

So it looks like the 2011 Giants are going to be a reasonable facsimile of the 2010 championship team, sans one Juan Uribe and plus a whinier substitute. There's an inherent peril in continuing to rely on players like Huff and Burrell who may have just had a couple of fluky stretches last year. Glass-half-empty types might point to Burrell's disastrous postseason and awful American League experience as a an indication that his torrid hitting in San Francisco might fizzle.

Remember the days when the Giants were signing questionable veteran players to three-year deals? Shudder. I guess Brian Sabean has learned. One year deals, once again, are hard to get worked up over. Burrell might sink into Old Player Skills hell and be a non-factor, or he might smack 25 homers and draw 90-100 walks. For what is probably going to amount to pennies, it's worth it to find out if Burrell has got that latter season in him. If so, this is a great deal, giving the Giants a productive one-year plug-in while Belt continues to develop.

More Miggy Magic

2010-11-30T23:20:00.000-08:00

First things first. I don't like Miguel Tejada. Not one bit. He's got to be one of my least favorite players in the league. He's one of the whiniest players I've ever seen, going back to his days with the A's, and he turned on-field bitching and moaning into an art form. He was one of the worst MVP choices in history in 2002, then had an epic brainfart in the 2003 ALDS. He mysteriously aged two years in one offseason, and, thanks to the Mitchell Report and Rafael Palmeiro's backstabbing, he has the steroid stink on him. His "my (bleeping) kids are in the stands" rant after the A's lost the ALDS to the Red Sox in 2003 is an all-time classic in the annals of "stop talking, you lost" fame. To put it mildly, I just bloody can't stand this guy.

So now he's going to replace our beloved Juan Uribe as the Giants' starting shortstop in 2011. For the amount of whine we're about to get, we're gonna need a damn big corkscrew (yeah, yeah).

The Tejada who we used to see in Oakland hitting home runs and crying over missed interference calls when he should have just kept freaking running is gone. Long live the slow, declining hitter who no longer has the range for shortstop and who was recently jettisoned by two of the worst teams in baseball. Giants pitchers will shudder at the prospect of a Tejada-Pablo left side of the infield, which features gaping holes that would make the Irish economy proud (sorry, Ireland, just know I love ye).

When I first caught wind of the deal, I was apoplectic, but at $6 million for one year, it isn't too bad, largely because the other shortstop options around are grim (moreso than Tejada, at least). I guess it was either overpay Uribe, trade for a guy like Jason Bartlett, or pin our noses and watch Emmanuel Burriss try to figure out major league pitching. Given these less appealing options, this signing is a little easier to take. Whatever keeps the Giants from a repeat of Bocock is fine in my book.

Just two years ago Tejada hit .313 in the National League. He didn't compliment that with much power or any kind of plate discipline, but heck, that production would have represented an above-average shortstop in 2010. It's not out of the question that he could do that again. He also put up some relatively good numbers while hitting in the Petco Park dead zone after being traded to the Padres. His upside for 2011 is probably 15 homers with a decent batting average. Remember that, despite his World Series heroics, Edgar Renteria was solidly below average with the bat in his two years here. Tejada would be an upgrade at the plate at the position.

It's the glove I'm more worried about. Tejada was always an overrated defensive player and now that he's gotten older he just really stinks. His status as a starter would merit a late-inning defensive replacement type, but the Giants already need one of those guys for Sandoval. Not to mention, where is that versatile glove guy going to come from? Mike Fontenot? Did you see him against the Phillies? Burriss? The data from his extended starting stints in 2008 and 2009 show that he was actually pretty crappy. Mark Derosa? He's got the power, but not the ability to play shortstop.

Tejada at this point is probably best utilized as a utility player in the Uribe mold, but I doubt that the Giants are paying him this much money to do anything other than start 150 games. I don't hate the deal in a baseball sense, because at one year even a poor performance isn't a long-term killer. I hate the deal because I have to root for this guy for an entire season.

Jazz Hands Waving Straight to Hell

2010-11-29T22:29:00.000-08:00

The first utterly offensive defection of the offseason occurred today, as Juan Uribe agreed to a three-year deal with baseball's erstwhile Southern California squad/satanic horde the Dodgers. He'll reportedly get $21 million over the life of the deal, blowing away any talk of a one-year deal with an option that would have been, you know, reasonable.

Man, this has just been a really crappy year for the Dodgers, any way you look at it. They finished below .500, mired in fourth place and stuck in Manny-inspired drama for much of the season. They dropped the season series to the arch-rival Giants, including a couple of devastating late-inning losses aided by Don Mattingly buffoonery and all-too familiar Jonathan Broxton implosions. They then watched the Giants go on to win theWorld Series, beating the Phillies, the team that had eliminated LA from the playoffs two years in a row, along the way. Now they're going to give way too much money to Juan Uribe because they got caught in a ridiculous bidding war that probably didn't exist. It's all too funny.

Obviously, I'll never say anything bad about Juan Uribe ever again in these pages. The guy was plain awesome in a Giants uni. I'll love him 'til I die. Three years, though, for 21 million dollars? Give me a break. You can have him, Dodger fans. As a free-swinging, low-OBP guy whose range in the field is bound to diminish fairly quickly as he ages, Uribe just wasn't worth going crazy over. Luckily for those of us in need of a good punchline, the Dodgers did it anyway. Uribe's a nice player and he's probably going to kill the Giants with a big home run in the next year or so, but this deal has about a ninety percent chance of blowing up in Ned Colletti's face.

As for Uribe's tenure with the Giants, I'm not sure what I can add that hasn't been beaten to death repeatedly. He arrived amidst a sea of Giant fan skepticism as a non-roster invitee in 2009, then left a hero in 2010. He showed a grouchy OBP nazi like me that you can have tons of value even if you do swing at everything within a stone's throw of home plate. The Giants wouldn't have been hoisting the World Series trophy last month if Brian Sabean hadn't taken a small chance on him back when Emmanuel Burriss and (God forbid) Brian Bocock were found wanting. He was one hell of a Good Giant.

--My favorite Juan Uribe story from his time as a Giant comes from Jonathan Sanchez's no-hitter in July of 2009. In that game, when Uribe muffed a grounder that would allow the only baserunner of the game to reach (thus robbing Sanchez of a perfect game), my friend sent me a text that was supposed to say "Damn Uribe". Instead, the autotext on his iPhone read it as "Damn Urine", and that's the message I received. Good thing I had my eyes glued to the game and knew exactly what was going on, because otherwise I would have been pretty worried at what kind of lurid crap my buddy was getting himself into.

The Best Damn Rookie, Period

2010-11-22T22:05:00.000-08:00

It's been a strange couple of weeks with no baseball. Suddenly I come home and instead, of a ball game to turn on I now have this strange thing known as free time. Scary, I know, but with the baseball season ended and with the Giants no longer torturing us, I'm once again free to pursue my other hobbies, like reading, watching Netflix movies, and reenacting I Am Legend with hobos.

The major Giants news of the offseason, of course, was that Buster Posey, the kid from Georgia who was drawing comparisons to Johnny freaking Bench by the end of the postseason, won the National League Rookie of the Year. He beat Jason Heyward in a surprising landslide, and became the first Giant to win the award since John Montefusco in 1975. Even though he was (controversially) kept in the minors until late May, he raked his way to the award with a .305/.357/.505 batting line and a Random-like throwing arm behind the plate (score one for the nerdy X-Factor reference). There's a debate somewhere that Heyward may have deserved it more, but damned if you're going to suck me into it.

The shocking thing about Posey wasn't that he'd be so good so fast, but that he was kind of the opposite of what fans had been expecting. The projections for Posey, based on the scouting reports from college and the minors, were that he'd be a sort of a line-drive, high-average type, a guy who would hit .300 annually, walk a ton, but also be lucky to top out at 15 homers in any given season. Even with the mediocre power numbers, the thinking went, he'd still be immensely valuable as a catcher due to his on-base skills. All hail the second coming of Darrell Porter, or something.

So, naturally, upon reaching the big leagues, Posey stopped drawing walks and started hitting the ball over the fence. He smashed 18 home runs in four months, while his walk rate sank fairly drastically from the solid minor league rates he had demonstrated (6.8% in the majors, down from 13.5% at AAA in 2010, and 11.3% in 2009). So, aside from the high average, were the scouts completely wrong? Was Posey just awesome in ways we never expected, like Dr. Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog?

Actually, there's a lot to get excited about from Posey's rookie season, aside from the obvious. Despite the decrease in total walks, he still saw 3.86 pitches per plate appearance, which is above the league average, pretty solid for a green rookie. His eye was still there, so you can imagine the walk totals will rise as pitchers start to approach him with more caution. Also, perhaps pitchers were more apt to challenge him early on because the scouting reports stated he wouldn't hit the ball over the fence.

The new power potential is drool-inducing, though, and since nearly half of his home runs were hit to right field or right-center, it's almost certainly legit. It's a far cry from the slappy line-drive hitter a lot of us thought we were getting. Plus, if he's belting home runs at this rate as a 23-year-old rook, it stands to reason that he could even add a little more. Add all this to his All-Star-caliber glove and suddenly you've got what could be a perennial MVP candidate (he even finished 11th in this year's voting) and face of the franchise for a decade. What a beautiful way to cap a magical year.

--You could forgive Giants fans for forgetting that the Rookie of the Year Award even existed, seeing as how the Giants hadn't put forth a legitimately good rookie position player since the mid-80's. Posey is the fifth Giant to win the award, but the first since way back in 1975. As a fun time-waster, I thought it'd be cool to check out how he rated when compared to the other guys to win the hardware in the Orange and Black. Here is a list of the five Giant ROYs, ranked by their Wins Above Replacement totals from that year (I'm using Baseball Reference's WAR calculations...non-dorks go here).

Buster Posey, 2010 (3.0)
Willie McCovey, 1959 (3.0)
Gary Matthews, 1973 (2.7)
Orlando Cepeda, 1958 (2.5)

John Montefusco, 1975 (6.8)

Cepeda and McCovey, of course, went on to have Hall of Fame careers. McCovey notoriously played in only 52 games in his rookie year, but he was so good in that limited timespan that he won the award anyway. Cepeda has the lowest WAR here because he played first base (the position with the least defensive value) and because of his relatively mediocre .342 OBP.

Matthews would go on to more fame with the Phillies (bonus points for destroying the Dodgers in the 1983 NLCS), but he was a very good player as a Giant, much better than I ever realized. He played a very good left field while drawing a good amount of walks and hitting for power. He's probably one of those guys who was underrated back in those days, especially since he was on some really bad Giants teams. For what it's worth, Bill James ranked him as the 46th-best left fielder in baseball history, and Ted Turner allegedly signed him to an extravagant contract while completely wasted.

I separated Montefusco from the others because it's clear WAR totals skew more toward pitchers, but Montefusco had one hell of a rookie season, striking out 215 batters and posting a 133 ERA+. Unfortunately, The Count threw nearly 500 innings in his first two seasons and quickly developed arm troubles. He was pretty mediocre for the entirety of his 13-year career, but he always had nasty things to say about the Dodgers, so he's okay in my book.

--Remember back in the 2007 draft, when a lot Giants fans were screaming for the team to draft Beau Mills, the power-hitting lefty out of Fresno State, to fill the drastic need for any kind of hitting talent in the farm system? Remember the outrage when the team took Madison Bumgarner instead? Yeah, flash forward three years. Bumgarner has just thrown a near-shutout in a pivotal World Series game, helping the Giants to their first ever championship in San Fran. Meanwhile, Mills has been nothing but awful in the minor leagues and the Indians have pretty much given up on him. Yes, I was one of those people hollering for the Giants to select Mills, and I think it's fair to say I didn't know more than the Giants' scouting department at the time. Yes, fueled by 20/20 hindsight, you can safely say that there's a word for people like me.

Anyway, good news! Mills is now eligible for the Rule V draft this offseason. So yeah, if the Giants are looking to bring in a AA washout who can't play any position on the field to placate us jerks who wanted him so badly three years ago, they're in luck.

Is This Heaven?

2010-11-01T23:34:00.000-07:00

In the 1997 NLDS, Edgar Renteria lined a fastball off of Giants reliever Roberto Hernandez to give the Marlins their first ever playoff victory. It was a hit that led to the playoff downfall of the magical Giants team and it prolonged the franchise's postseason agony. Thirteen years later, that same shortstop, now a grizzled veteran, would launch a three-run home run to vault the Giants to their first World Championship in franchise history. I think it's safe to say that all is forgiven, Edgar.

In the coming days and weeks there will be "analysis" about how the Giants won this series and how they got it done all year. Not tonight. I'm going to bask in this, and since I have to work tomorrow and can't get rip-roaring, falling-down wasted in celebration, I'm going to do the next best thing: Switch it to MLB Network and watch highlights and post-game interviews until I lose the capacity for coherent thought.

I went jogging after the game ended tonight and I felt like running my entire route with my fist raised in the air in triumph. I would have looked like a doofus and a jerk, but I wouldn't have cared. It's a weird feeling, being so proud of an achievement that you had absolutely nothing to do with and made no contribution to whatsoever, excepting rabid moral support. Yet it feels so damn good to be a Giants fan right now. What a team and what a season. This smile on my face isn't going to wear off any time soon. Go Giants, baby. Go Giants, indeed.

For Giants fans everywhere, say it loud! World Champions!

One More Win

2010-10-31T22:59:00.000-07:00

Before Game Four, there had already been speculation that Madison Bumgarner might be a better option than Jonathan Sanchez in a potential Game Seven, given Sanchez's recent struggles and his decreased velocity. Now, that debate will only intensify. Bumgarner was magical tonight, getting ahead of every hitter and completely dominating the Ranger lineup. Over the course of the season, Bumgarner had been very good away from home (yeah, yeah), but this was ridiculous. I think the Rangers had maybe a half-dozen good swings off of him all night.

As brilliant as MadBum was, he was still helped out a bunch by some masterful defensive play, a lot of which came courtesy of Bruce Bochy's lineup machinations. Benching Pat Burrell and playing Travis Ishikawa and Nate Schierholtz seemed like moves that would have second-guess artists drooling, but they worked out beautifully. With Schierholtz in right, Cody Ross shifted to left field, giving the Giants a heavy duty vacuum of an outfield defense. Sure enough, the Rangers hit about four balls to left field tonight that I doubt Burrell would have gotten to. I think Burrell still plays tomorrow, but I think Bochy will tell him to suck it up and DH while Aaron Rowand or Schierholtz play the field.

Once upon a time, in 1998, Bochy mismanaged the World Series so badly that he basically handed a superior Yankees team two games on the way to being swept. My entire impression of his managing skills came from those four games, in which his bumbling killed any chance the Padres had at winning their first title. Now he looks like a freaking genius. Every move, or every really big move, that he's made this postseason has worked out, whether it be in terms of lineup construction, bullpen usage, or by telling Jose Guillen to fuck off.

So the Giants are one win from their first World Championship in the San Francisco era. We've been here before, and we all know about the crazy and unbelievable ways this team can break our hearts. I don't have that feeling though, this time. Back in 2002 I almost wasn't ready to accept that I was finally going to actually see the Giants win a World Series (and they didn't). Now I'm prepared to celebrate. One...more...win...

Quick Pre-Series Grumblings

2010-10-26T00:11:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I didn't even want to think of the World Series. It was a day to let it all sink in, to finally sit down and appreciate the fact that the Giants had defied the odds and the pundit naysaying and won the pennant. In the surreal and eventually drunken hours that followed the Game Six fidget-fest, this was virtually impossible to do. My stomach didn't untie itself until Sunday morning when I woke up, having been through hell and back the night before, with one insane, runner-infested inning after another in a game that probably took a few years off my life.

When Brian Wilson struck Ryan Howard out with that slider on the outside, the whoosh of a sigh I let out could have cooled an entire desert nation for a month. Even as the nerves subsided, I was still too amped up to really understand the importance of what had just happened, that the team was going to the World Series for just the third time in my lifetime. Only the next morning could I finally just relax, not having to worry about another game for a few days. Now it was time to sit on the couch and watch MLB Network recaps until my eyeballs melted.

That time has passed, however, and it's time to start stressing again. Are you ready for more torture? When Game Six ended, I told myself that I couldn't take another series of this, but here we are, staring into the mouth of what promises to be another grind-it-out affair. The minute my alarm clock set off this morning, I started fretting about who would start Game Two, who would DH in the games in Texas, and just where in the hell Jose Guillen made off to. Once again, the Giants are the underdog, as the experts are almost universally picking Texas to roll through them without much trouble. Somehow, I don't think the Giants are wetting their pants.

The Giants just gutted out a six-game war of attrition with the defending NL champ, so one thing I'd possibly be worried about is simple exhaustion, whether it be from Tim Lincecum and Brian Wilson for being stretched out against Philly, or the hitters from grinding out so many damned at-bats, time and again. I know I'm effing exhausted after watching that series, and all I did was yell profanity at the TV and throw Cheez-Its at Ryan Howard. I wasn't out there putting my nose to the grindstone like the players.

Oh, and one other thing to be sorta worried about. The Giants are facing an opponent that is making its first appearance in the World Series in franchise history, an opponent who just knocked off the Yankees and who comes from the AL West, to boot. Sound familiar? Yeah, I don't want to think about it, either.

--The number one source of debate for Giants fans seems to be who exactly will DH in the games in Texas? "That's easy!", you say. "Good ol' Pat Burrell! He sucks afield, so stick him in the DH slot and all will be well!"

Not so fast there, bub. Burrell's .209/.306/.348 career line as a DH is abysmal (in more than 600 plate appearances, enough of a sample size to mean something), and he has made it no secret that he hates the position. He seems to be one of those guys, like Jason Giambi, who just sucks if he isn't out in the field during games. Besides, if he goes out, who takes his place in the outfield? Nate Schierholtz hasn't been hitting and Aaron Rowand hasn't done anything all year. The apocalyptic Eugenio Velez and Jose Guillen options seem too far-fetched even for Bruce Bochy's "anything goes" managerial mindset this postseason. Move Aubrey Huff out there? More on that in a sec.

Ok, so the next best option is our favorite member of the Ursidae family, Pablo Sandoval. Should be a no-brainer, right? Once again, hold your horses, bub. Sandoval has been awful both on the road and against lefties this season. He's guaranteed to face at least two lefties in the games in Texas, maybe three if the Rangers choose to throw Derek Holland in Game Four. So, going by this year's stats, starting Pablo as the DH would essentially be like having another pitcher in the lineup.

Ok then, moving on. What about moving Huff to DH and starting Travis Ishikawa, as has been thrown around a lot today? Well, once again the lefty platoon thing comes into effect, and Ishikawa is just not a good enough hitter to be starting World Series games, period. The upgrade in defense isn't enough to justify this move, since Huff hasn't been bad at all this year (Game Five LCS flub notwithstanding).

So, who then? Mike Fontenot? Again with the lefties, and he has zero power. Rowand? You would think he'd be at an advantage facing a bunch of lefty hurlers, but even he was pretty useless against southpaws this year (though he does have an .826 lifetime OPS against them). Dig up Guillen from whatever ditch he's sleeping in and insert him back into the lineup? Excuse me while I throw up in my mouth.

Out of all the unappetizing options, I think it's best to just go with Sandoval. While he was a mess against lefties this season, last year he absolutely destroyed them (.379/.428/.600). I know last year is last year, but it shows that at least at some point he had a clue how to hit left-handed pitchers, and he's the guy with the most potential to get rip-roaring hot and become a weapon in the series. Plus, maybe the hitter-friendly environs of Arlington will invigorate him. Yeah, I'm grasping at straws with that last one, but what else to do with this bunch? Vote Panda for DH!

-Fans are clamoring for Jonathan Sanchez to get two starts at Mays Field at all costs after his near-self-destruction on the mound in Philadelphia. So of course Bruce Bochy announces that he'll be starting Game Three in Texas, and then Game Seven in SF should it come down to that. Can you picture a shaky Sanchez on the mound in a Game Seven scenario, trying to protect a tenuous lead while walking every other batter and screaming at opposing hitters for taking off their batting gloves? Get your oven doors prepped.

One thing before we completely give up on Sanchez: as awful as he was in Game Six in Philly (and he was awful), this is the same guy who dealt in the division-clinching game against San Diego and then completely dominated the Braves in a hostile environment in the first round of the playoffs. To say he suddenly can't handle pressure is to forget the last three weeks or so of Giants baseball, or, hell, the entire month of September. Sanchez didn't have it Saturday. He didn't have any rhythm, he got flustered, then he started yelling at people. Hell, it happens. It's a tad knee-jerk to just lose all confidence in him after one bad outing. I'm sure happy he's our Game Three starter instead of some lesser light.

-It's the age-old question: Will Barry Zito finally get his chance to be on the postseason roster? As much as I'd like to see Zito throw a playoff inning or two, I don't see it. With Bochy willing to use Madison Bumgarner for multiple innings in between postseason starts, Zito becomes totally redundant, which doubly hurts since he's just not very good. Even Guillermo Mota, who is by far the lowest on the bullpen food chain, still throws hard, which gives him value in a worst-comes-to-worst, need-a-strikeout scenario. Zito can impress with his ability to mimic Andy Summers, but not with his ability to miss bats, so he's likely stuck on the bench for one more round.

-Reason number 5,701 why the world needed the Giants to beat the Phillies this weekend.

-Finally, a quick list of NLCS unsung heroes, headed by Jeremy Affeldt for his Game Six bullpen heroics. Joe Posnanski, whom Affeldt says is the reason he has a career, sums it up better than I ever could.

One guy lost in the Cody Ross/Brian Wilson hubbub was Freddy Sanchez, who came alive to hit .360 in the series and seemed to be on the bases during every Giants threat. Andres Torres also thankfully remembered that he was actually good and started to play like the 2010 version we all know and love. His crucial play on Ryan Howard's fifth-inning double in Game Six, which literally saved a run and maybe the game, will probably be forgotten in the haze over the years, but it was a clutch defensive play by any definition.

Lastly, don't forget Madison Bumgarner, who was absolute nails in his Game Six relief stint. Fighting out of the bases loaded jam in the fifth was impressive enough, but striking out Ben Francisco in the sixth, when all that was needed was a fly ball to put the Phils ahead, was a major turning point in the game. When I was 21, I was only worried about drinking legally, getting laid, and not sleeping past my morning classes. This guy's out there throwing clutch playoff innings as 50,000 drunk fans scream horrible things at him. That takes some guts.

Giants Win the Pennant! Giants Win the Pennant!

2010-10-23T21:37:00.000-07:00

Juan Uribe. Cody Ross. Jeremy Affeldt. Brian Wilson. They never have to buy a beer in San Francisco ever again. What a game. What a series. What a team. Time to celebrate.

That is all.

P.S. What the hell is "The Machine". Do I even want to know?

Giants Win Ulcer-tastic Game Four

2010-10-20T23:56:00.000-07:00

One positive note to the years when the Giants miss the playoffs: I can actually enjoy baseball. With nothing at stake I can just relax, kick my seat back, and take in a good match of this fine game they call baseball. No pressure, and none of that annoying nonsense known as "emotional investment".

Years like 2010, though, when the Giants are in the playoffs? Yeesh. I'm super-excited that my team is playing deep into October, obviously, and I'm ecstatic they're one win from the World Series, but when the actual games are being played, I'm not sure you can characterize what I go through as "enjoyment". When I'm pacing around my apartment during every tense moment in the game, sweating and mumbling, popping Pepto Bismols to ease my churning stomach (I wish I were kidding), I look more like a maniac on the verge of a complete breakdown than a fan having fun watching sports. I'm like Billy Beane as portrayed in Moneyball, only without the goofy white box and with no chairs to throw. Brian Wilson said after the game tonight that he had an ulcer forming after all of this. You and me both, buddy.

Game Four tonight was the most antacid-laced of the NLCS, a see-saw battle that ended with the Giants winning, only after it looked like they were poised to break our hearts yet again. After being handed an early 2-0 lead, Madison Bumgarner suddenly lost it in the fifth inning as the Phillies' bats finally woke up and hammered out four runs. You knew the Giants would come back and tie, as they did, against crappy Joe Blanton and a shaky Phillie bullpen. Holding the lead they got, however, was another matter entirely.

Sure enough, they blew it, thanks to a Sergio Romo hanging slider, something that is becoming frighteningly common in these playoffs. Luckily Romo settled down, Brian Wilson did his usual brilliant pitching while looking like a total scary bastard, and Juan Uribe came through...again...with the game-winner. As Aubrey Huff (no matter where this guy goes after the season or how the rest of his career goes, he is going to be freaking adored by Giants fans forever, with good reason) chugged home with the winning run, the butterflies in my stomach turned into goosebumps. As painful and crazy as it is, I wouldn't want it any other way.
If there was one major advantage the Giants had going into this series it was their edge in bullpen strength, and that certainly manifested itself tonight. It spoke volumes to how little faith Charlie Manuel had in his bullpen that he was willing to bring in Roy Oswalt on limited rest rather than leave it up to Brad Lidge or some other ne'er-do-well on that relief staff in crunch time. The Phils' relievers are so unreliable (except Ryan Madson, but he had already been used) that their manager had to grab at straws in order for his team to stay alive. Sure enough, the Giants got to the now-hittable Oswalt and won the game. Give Manuel credit though, for doing something unorthodox because, really, who else was he going to turn to going into extra innings with the series on the line.

So are the Phillies phucked? Hardly. They still throw arguably the best pitcher in the NL out there tomorrow and then two more ace-caliber pitchers after him. They're up against the wall and they're battling in a street fight with a plastic knife, but they're aren't finished by any stretch. There are too many postseason stories of the ace pitcher tossing a masterpiece game to get his team back in the series. The Phils can't be written off at all. There are plenty of ass jawbones laying around the streets of San Francisco, I'm sure. No one wants to see this series go back to Philadephia, where anything can happen in that bandbox full of moronic jackasses (or did you not see this?). Plus, wouldn't it just be nice to clinch it in front of the home fans?

Luckily, the Giants have their own (little) big gun in Tim Lincecum to combat Halladay. Two aces matched up with a chance for the Giants to win their fourth pennant in the San Francisco era. Who in their right mind wouldn't watch this? I know I'll be ready with my Tums.

Giants. Phils. In the Words of Mills Lane...

2010-10-15T16:57:00.000-07:00

This.

It's 24 hours before the most anticipated postseason pitching matchup of the 21st century, and I have a worry. Several of them, actually. I worry that the Giants and their often-slumbering offense will be powerless against the man who no-hit the team that scored the most runs in the National League. I'm worried that the powerful Phillie lineup far outclasses that of the Giants'. I'm worried that our soon-to-be robot overlords are already predicting a Phillie rout. I'm worried that even the Giants' awesome starting pitching can't match the Phils' "Aces Three". I'm worried that Olivia Munn won't return my creepy texts. Wait, forget that last one.

Screw it. Enough with the manic depressive diatribe. If there's one thing the Torture Giants of 2010 have taught us, it's to never count them out, and to expect the unexpected. Swept by the Dodgers at home in late-June? No problem. Lose a crucial series to the Padres in August after your third starter talks a bunch of crap in the newspapers? Pssh. Lose a devastating game on a ninth-inning, bizarro broken bat triple by Carlos Gonzalez? Feh, just win six of the next seven. A clueless Jose Guillen acquisition threatens to derail the season? Just cut him from the postseason roster and let his malcontented ways take care of themselves.

Even in the ALCS, after blowing Game Two, the surprises continued. When Eric Hinske homered in Game Three, we all got those Giant playoff flashbacks. I'm sure you're all-too familiar. Instead of caving to the ghost of Bobby Jones, they battled back, with the help of a Bobby Cox brainfart here and a Brooks Conrad there, and won the series. Even when it looked like Derek Lowe was going to Halladay them in Game Four, they fought back behind the strength of my new favorite Giant, Cody Ross, to win the series. By now we should know to never count them out of anything.

I'm sure you've heard writers in the past few days state that the Giants' playoff chances are zilch. Don't listen. It's the same mantra that's been repeated by doubters all year. If it isn't that they have no offense, it's because their GM is an idiot. If it isn't because Bengie Molina is their cleanup hitter it's because they're paying a fifth starter $18 million this year. When people said they couldn't beat the Padres, the Giants blew right by them When they said that the Giants couldn't hold back the Rockies, they went into Coors Field and took it to them. When people said that Jose Guillen was a worthless piece of doo-doo on a stick...well, they were right on that one.

I won't make a prediction for this series because, again, I don't want to jinx this team, but I will predict the obvious: this isn't going to be a Phillie steamroll session. Philadelphia's bats have traditionally struggled in Mays Field (.568 OPS in the three games this year -yeah, yeah small sample size), and the big power alleys might help squash the Phils' power advantage. If the Giants can win just one game in Philly, the Phils could come back to SF clawing at the wall in frustration as the fly balls that land ten rows deep at Citizens Bank are caught at Mays Field.

Regardless, it should be a fun series, and I'm cautiously optimistic. I'm prepared for the oncoming bouts of stomach butterflies and torrential profanity, followed by heavy drinking and the inevitable drunken lecture to the terrified waitress at the bar as to why she's the reason the Giants can't hit Roy Oswalt. Then crying may ensue. Ah playoff baseball, how I've missed thee.

The Giants have that feel this year. That vibe. A lot of things have gone right so far. Why would it stop now? Or have those "It's Magic Inside" ads lied to me?

Game Three: Giants 3, Braves 2 (or, The Rise and Fall of Brooks Conrad)

2010-10-10T22:38:00.000-07:00

My brain is still a dizzy mess from the whirlwind that was today's 3-2 victory over the Braves, so a few quick notes before I prepare myself for what is sure to be more painful baseball watching tomorrow. I don't think I can maintain my sanity or functionality as a member of society if every game is like this.

--Brooks Conrad probably doesn't deserve this. He slogged his way through nine seasons in the minors, and starting playoff games for a big club after so much time toiling away in AAA only comes about through lots of hard work and resilience. I'm sure he's also a pleasant person and a good teammate. So watching him fumble away Game Three was great as a Giants fan but painful as a human being. He's a talented guy who won the hearts of Braves fans with a couple of big grand slams, but he doesn't belong anywhere near second base, or anywhere that requires a glove be put on, for that matter. I'd be shocked to see him start any more games for the rest of the postseason. It's tough, but I'll feel more sorry for him once the Giants don't have to deal with the Braves anymore.

--One major, and perhaps unrecognized, hero of the game is Travis Ishikawa. A week after I bashed his presence on the postseason roster, he worked a huge walk (in a great at-bat) against the flamethrowing Craig Kimbrel in the ninth to start the Giants' game-winning rally. Credit also to Freddy Sanchez for his bounceback at-bat that extended the game when the Giants were on death's door (though I still can't believe Kimbrel threw him a slider after Sanchez looked so awful against his fastball).

--For all the energy spent complaining about Pablo Sandoval's bad play, it's probably worth it to mention that Juan Uribe has been pretty godawful this series, too. He had two miserable at bats today with runners all over the place and Tim Hudson laboring, and he's been a hacktastic mess all series. Just a little patience and a hit would have rendered the late-game craziness unnecessary. I guess the difference between Uribe and Panda is that Uribe's defense is still good, but I wouldn't be surprised to see Edgar Renteria in there soon if Uribe continues to look like he has no clue up there.

--Why does Sergio Romo suck all of a sudden? Why? That is all.

--The win gives the Giants the major tactical advantage of allowing Madison Bumgarner to start Game Four instead of worrying about throwing Tim Lincecum on short rest. The success rate of pitchers going on short rest in the playoffs is pretty crummy. Now Timmy doesn't have the stats against him and Bumgarner can throw on the road, where he's been so good this year. Yeah, you know that means we'll see this guy tomorrow...

NLDS Game One: Giants 1, Braves 0 (or, Timmah!)

2010-10-08T16:31:00.000-07:00

Was Tim Lincecum's complete game, 14-strikeout blanking of the Braves the best pitching performance in San Francisco Giants history? I'd have to believe so. His main competition is Jack Sanford and his shutout in Game Two of the 1962 World Series, Dave Dravecky in Game Two of the 1987 ALCS, and Jason Schmidt in the 2003 ALDS. As good as those performances were, Lincecum blows them away.

Going purely by Game Score (go here, you purists, you), Sanford's shutout of a power-laden Yankee lineup rated an 84. Dravecky's performance rated an 85, while Schmidt's moment of glory against the Marlins rated 86. Lincecum's Game Score from last night? An insane 96, which is like the second-best in postseason history (it rated even better than Roy Halladay's no-hitter, which came in at 94). It was mostly due to the strikeouts, but also due to the fact that he surrendered just two hits and made Braves hitters look bad all night. I'm not one for hyperbole, but Lincecum's performance was a million times better than Don Larsen, Whitey Ford, and Curt Schilling combined. Freaktober is here.

On that high note, let me bring you all down with a cautionary tale from the past. Remember back in 2003, after Jason Schmidt waltzed through the Marlins' lineup, and every Giants fan assumed the team would coast past Florida and into the NLCS? Right. Complacency has a way of biting those who practice it. The Marlins came out swinging in a Game Two victory, then went on to win the next two contests in heartbreaking fashion. Yes, the Giants had to follow Schmidt up with fat, worthless Sidney Ponson that series, while Matt Cain follows Lincecum tonight, but still. Timmy's brilliance has us all revved up, and rightly so, but after years of playoff disappointment, Giants fans should know not to get cocky.

--The Giants caught some huge breaks last night in addition to Lincecum's brilliance. The most obvious was the horrible safe call that went in their favor on Buster Posey's stolen base. The play led directly to the only run in the game, and Braves fans are still up in arms. If I were on the other side, I'd be frothing at the mouth, too. However, no Giants fan is going to shed a tear for another team after a blown call literally cost them a game against the Mets this year, an error that very well could have cost them the division.

The other major break was Bobby Cox's decision to walk Pablo Sandoval and pitch to Cody Ross after Posey's hit in the fourth inning. Pablo looked awful in his first at bat, and Ross has been swinging a hot stick for two weeks. That early in the game, it seemed to make more sense to pitch to Sandoval, because he appeared to be ready to swing at anything. Instead, Cox inexplicably walked him, and Ross made the Braves pay (albeit on a hit that Omar Infante probably should have handled).

--Freddy Sanchez had an inauspicious playoff debut with some of the worst at bats you'll see in his first two times up. He quickly erased Andres Torres on the bases with a double play in the first inning, then swung at a pitch a foot off the plate in the third, leading to a rally-killing rundown. Hopefully he was just overanxious, but man, I'd expect better plate patience out of Eugenio.

--I'll be catching Game Two in about an hour at one of my favorite sports bars in Sac. I'll either be drinking to celebrate, or drinking to forget. Either way, I'll be drinking. Giants baseball. Beer. Just like Flame and Citron, has there ever been a sweeter combination? Go Giants!

Playoff Predictions and Added Ranting

2010-10-05T23:50:00.000-07:00

The mad scramble for a spot on the 25-man playoff roster is under way and the countdown has begun before Tim Lincecum squares off against Derek Lowe on Thursday, but before I get to any of that, here are some quick predictions for the first round, starting with the American League.

Rays 3, Rangers 2

I kind of wish these teams weren't meeting in the first round, because I like them both and would normally like to see a deep playoff run for both of them. The Rangers haven't been to the postseason since 1999 and haven't won a playoff series in their entire history, while the Rays are the paragon of shrewd team building, utilizing very limited resources. Both teams are built similarly, with an emphasis on pitching and defense, but the Rays have a deceptively good offense and I think they'll squeak this out. Should be an exciting series, though.

Speaking of the Rays, the next time some beer-drunk simpleton tries to come at you with the "Moneyball is dead" argument and says that Billy Beane's saber-friendly methods of building team offense didn't work, just point to Tampa. The Rays ranked third in the AL in runs scored, despite finishing thirteenth in batting average. If you look up and down their starting lineup, you'll find a rogue's gallery of subpar batting averages, the most extreme being Carlos Pena at .196. How did they score runs with such an inability to rack up hits?

Well, good friend, they did it by ranking sixth in the league in OBP and first in walks. Even though the batting average was low, they were still getting a lot of runners on base. When they got on base, they were great at moving across the diamond, as the team led the league with 172 steals and only got caught 45 times. The love of OBP and the disregard for batting average are, of course, two of the major tenets of Moneyball that traditionalists still get up in arms about, all these years later.

The Rays are doing a nice job of proving that the philosophy* not only still works, but that you can utilize these skills without having to rely on slow players with zero defensive skills like the A's did in the early-Aughts. The Rays have compiled a bunch of burners who can play good defense while also getting on base at an above-average rate. They're almost a perfect example of a "Moneyball" team, even if no one realizes it or decides to write a book about them. Tell the drunk guy at the bar to put that in his Alaskan Amber and choke on it.

*I guess we'll call it that; focusing simply on OBP when discussing whether Moneyball has "worked" or not has always been a shining display of a clear misunderstanding of the book, but that's a rant long past its expiration date.

Yankees 3, Twins 1

In 2003, 2004, and in 2009, the Twins made the playoffs and faced the Yankees, only to get creamed each time. 2004 was the most devastating, as the Twins appeared ready to take a 2-0 lead back to the Metrodome, only to have an exhausted Joe Nathan blow it in extra innings in Game 2. Then Ruben Sierra inexplicably showed a pulse in Game 4 of that series, putting Minnesota in the unenviable position of having Kyle Lohse on the mound with the season on the line. Soon the Twins were no more.

Is this the year the Twins finally break through and beat their erstwhile tormentors? I hope so, because I'm sick of the fucking Yankees. They used to be a fun villain, awesome to hate in a Kurtwood-Smith-in-Robocop kind of way, but now they're just a bunch of boring geriatrics, and if they advance to the World Series instead of the three other teams that feature exciting young players, my head might explode.

With Justin Morneau healthy, I'd take the Twins, but he's gone and I don't trust Minnesota's pitching at all. Who's behind Francisco Liriano? Carl Pavano? I fear smoke and mirrors and a low strikeout rate. Scott Baker? Kevin Slowey? Both are likely to get tattooed by the Yankee sluggers, and the Twins' miserable corner outfield defense won't help matters. The Yankees have pitching issues themselves, but I think their bats should be more than enough to blow by the Twins. Gotta root for Joe Mauer, though, who my Minnesota-based uncle insists is my clone (looks-wise; certainly not talent-wise).

Phillies 3, Reds 0

I don't see this being close, but maybe I'm wrong. The Phils have essentially three aces going in Roy Halliday, Roy Oswalt, and Cole Hamels, and that seems like death to opponents in a best-of-five series. The Reds have a terrific set of hitters, but man, that's quite a gauntlet to run in a short series. Combine that with their high-octane offense, one which I doubt the Reds' shaky pitching staff can control, and I think this'll be a quick exit for Cincinnati. Which would be too bad. Any new blood that makes its way deep into the playoffs is good for baseball and more fun for me.

Giants, ehhhhhh...

I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to make a prediction for this series because I'm not going to jinx this team. Any words in this space will involve me predicting the Giants to sweep behind three perfect games from the starting pitchers and a five-homer performance from Buster Posey in Game 3, so I refuse to be the one responsible for the jinx that brings the Giants down.

I could use the old reverse-jinx trick and predict that the Braves will win, but then I just look like an asshole rooting against his team for the sake of being right on some stupid blog predictions. Then I really look like an asshat if the Braves do win. So forget it.

--Here's a brief look at some players who I don't think should be on the playoff roster come Thursday. I'm sure you can guess one of them, if you've read through this blog in the past 24 hours and are familiar with my typical obsessive hating.

-Travis Ishikawa. I think Ishikawa might be the most one-dimensional player I've ever seen. He does one thing well, and that's play great defense at first base. Sadly, that's the only position he plays and he doesn't hit. His performance as a pinch hitter this year has drawn praise, but his .874 OPS in that role is a total fluke. Small sample size, people! Pinch hitting statistical noise and good glove aren't going to be enough. The Giants could use a good left-handed bench bat, but Mike Fontenot will have to do.

-Dan Runzler. On a team that now sports Javier Lopez along with Jeremy Affeldt, Mr. Erratic is about as redundant as you can possibly get. I can't stomach Runzler's walk-the-bases loaded act in regular season blowouts, so I think my eyes would melt if I had to watch him pitch in the postseason. His exclusion is pretty much a foregone conclusion.

-Chris Ray. If the Giants really are going with eleven pitchers, that means a three-man battle royale between Ray, Guillermo Mota, and Barry Zito for that final spot in the pen. Zito has been such a mainstay that I think the Giants are going to keep him active, regardless of whether he deserves it or not. Hooray for tokenism! Mota was a total non-entity in the second half of the year, but he still throws hard and his ability to get a strikeout could prove useful in a tight spot. Ray is essentially mop-up fodder whom I have little faith in, but he could still have some value if the Giants do decide to go with twelve pitchers.

-Jose Guillen. Yep, here it is. Guillen will never be left off the playoff roster, but he certainly should be. I just freaking hate this guy. He's a bad player and everyone realizes it except for the two guys who matter: Brain Sabean and Bruce Bochy. Aaron Rowand can't hit anymore, but he's still pretty good with the glove, so he gives you some value. Nate Schierholtz is a great glove who needs to be around as a late-game defensive sub. Guillen gives you nothing but the ghost of a hitting ability that was once there. Unfortunately that ghost haunts Bruce Bochy's dreams, playing him like a Power Glove.

--A quick link for your enjoyment. Keith Law, one of my favorite baseball columnists around, offered his postseason award ballot on ESPN the other day. The real fun, though, begins in the comments section, and it gets really good when Klaw starts to respond. It's pure comedy gold.

We're In It! Playoff Ponderings

2010-10-05T00:11:00.000-07:00

Everybody who knows me can tell you that I absolutely love baseball, but crap like the weekend series against the Padres demonstrates nicely why I kind of hate it too. It can just kill you, and make your stomach contort in ways you never knew possible. On the brink of an unthinkable collapse, the Giants suddenly broke out the grins and yelled "Just Kidding!" to an exasperated fanbase, and won it on the final day of the season. Nothing comes easy with this team. I guess we were naive to think it would happen any other way. It's the story of the 2010 Giants. Torture, indeed.

I was part of the screaming masses on Friday (albeit not waving an orange towel; I completely whiffed on that when walking through the gate), a deafening cacophany of rabid voices desperate for postseason baseball. It was the loudest craziest crowd I've ever seen at a baseball game, and everybody was ready to whoop it up in celebration of a Giants clincher. I had my camera primed to capture the moment. Yet it wasn't to be. It was an exciting game, with an abortive comeback attempt, but it ended prematurely on an epic Freddy Sanchez brainfart. My plea to witness history went unanswered, and 40,000 people death marched out of the stadium, looking toward the weekend for solace.

Then came the Barry Zito Fail Start, and suddenly those doubts started creeping in. You know...The Doubts. Those feelings that have built up over the years and have been exacerbated by inexplicable Neifi Perez home runs and brutal Pudge Rodriguez collisions. As Jose Guillen grounded into yet another feeble double play to end the game, I got that sick feeling, preparing to be turned into a blubbering, weeping mess as the Giants inevitably blew it on Sunday. It's amazing how Giants fandom can turn you so schizophrenic. One moment I'm jumping around in the upper deck, squealing in joy like a crazed 12-year-old girl, the next I'm a profane, pessimistic bastard. Perhaps if I were properly medicated I wouldn't even like this team.

Thank goodness for Jonathan Sanchez though, and really, it was totally appropriate that he be the one to shut the door on the Padres after his unprovoked ranting in August. Hey, it came almost two months too late, but he was right. Um, sort of. Also, in a bit of tasty karma, Mat Latos got the Padres' season-killing loss in a start that was worse than his end pitching line will show (he was giving up rockets all game; he would have been nailed for at least five runs on most other days). Latos's buffoonish comments about the Giants' supposed mercenary squad (not to mention smashing Dave Flemming's sunroof with a baseball) probably sealed his fate.

So the Giants are in the playoffs for the first time since 2003, and I seriously can't believe it's been that long since I got to watch a Giants clinching celebration, with Bud Light and champagne flowing like geysers. It felt good. I laughed, I cried, and I broke out the Thumbscrew. Hey, what better way to celebrate this torturous team?

This is the first time since I've been maintaining the Stankeye blog (in its many starts and fits and bizarre incarnations) that I get to write about the Giants as they are in the playoffs. In fact, this blog was inspired by the Giants' failure to make the postseason in 2004, and my need to vent after watching that travesty unfold. So basically, I'm out of my element here. I don't know what to do with myself. This blog has been built on bad Giants teams, and from making fun of awful Brian Sabean moves and Barry Zito. What to do?

All I know is that I can't wait until Thursday, when Mays Field should be a rockin'. Expect playoff coverage from yours truly, along with the usual torrents of profanity and stupid You Tube videos. For now, here's a quick rundown of some things I'd like to see happen in this upcoming playoff series and (hopefully) beyond.

--Cody Ross needs to be the starting right fielder in the playoffs. I'm fairly adamant about this, because his bat has come around in the past few weeks, and even when exposed to right-handed pitchers (his weaker platoon split), he's every bit the hitter Jose Guillen is and three times the fielder. Unfortunately, the Giants have this weird blind spot when it comes to Guillen that prevents them from realizing that he sucks. If the Giants don't insert Ross as the right fielder and leave him there, come hell or high water, they're asking for trouble.

--Keep Nate Schierholtz on the playoff roster for his late-inning defense. Leave Guillen off. Yes, this Schierholtz-love/Guillen-hate thing has likely reached ridiculous proportions here at Stankeye, but I don't care. Guillen is worthless! He had one big game against Milwaukee and one or two big hits sprinkled around, but otherwise was one big pile of detriment with the Giants. Hell, I'd rather have Eugenio Velez on the roster instead of Guillen. At least he brings speed and pretend versatility to the table.

Sticking with Schierholtz as a late-inning defensive replacement for Pat Burrell seems like a no-brainer, but he fell completely out of favor late in the year and you just never know what Sabean and Bruce Bochy are thinking. He, Ross, and Andres Torres give the Giants one of the rangiest outfields you'll ever see for late-game purposes, a huge weapon with that bullpen and a late lead.

--Aaron Rowand and Barry Zito do something good in the playoffs. It's dubious whether these guys should be on the playoff roster, but they no doubt will be since they've been with the team for so long now. I would love to see the two most maligned Giants come up big in the playoffs, in any capacity. As much crap as I've given Zito on this site over the years, I actually really like the guy, and I was rooting very hard for him to do well in his start Saturday. I'm not sure how he'd do it (assuming Madison Bumgarner is the fourth playoff starter), but I'd love to see him get a big out or two, or pitch some strong innings in relief, or maybe get a tough lefty out in a key spot, and earn some cheers from Giants fans.

The same goes for Rowand. His contract was a terrible mistake from the second the inked dried, but he still plays hard as hell and he's taken his benching like a man (from all appearances, at least). I'd love to see him jack a homer or come up with a big hit in the playoffs, just for some sort of redemptive value. Funny how I suddenly do a 180 and proclaim my fondness for a bad player once the team starts making playoff appearances.

--Make MadBum the fourth starter. Yes, this should be a no-brainer, but once again, you just never know when Bochy might go wacky on us and decide he wants "veteran presence" over youth, and make an ill-fated decision to start Zito in a key game. I mean, why is this even an open question? Again, I'm rooting for Zito to do well, but he doesn't belong anywhere near the mound at the start of a playoff game. I don't care if Bumgarner has the playoff mentality of a twelve-year-old in stirrups. Start him!

--A World Championship. Yep, it's the only way for this post to end. Go Giants!

Clinch Day at the Yard?

2010-10-01T14:18:00.000-07:00

When I embarked on a road trip to Las Vegas last week, the Giants were up a mere half-game in first place on the Padres and heading into an uberscary series against the Rockies in uberscary Coors Field. A series win against the Rockies meant that Colorado was ostensibly done, but in the Theater of the Absurd that is Coors Field, you figure that would be an impossible task. My goal? Get so rip-roaring drunk in Vegas that I either forgot about the Giants series, or didn't care. I was going to be happy if the Giants won just one game of the three.

Unfortunately, Giants obsession is infinitely stronger than copious amounts of booze. There I was, on the road, from Sacramento to Mammoth, and from the death-defying backroad passes of Death Valley to Las Vegas, stuck obsessively checking my phone for a box score, as my phone service waned in and out. Even in Vegas, that magical wonderland where people snort coke in the urinals next to you and friendly strippers declare their undying love for you, only to break your heart an hour and $300 later, I found myself checking box scores. Things were a hazy blur as we left Vegas and headed for Joshua Tree, where the sheer majesty of Keys View and the bizarre rock formations didn't prevent me from taking a totally nerdy fanboy photo.

From there it was back up through the grimy hellstorm of rush hour traffic in LA, then up 101 along the coast through Pismo and San Luis Obispo, to a stay in Morro Bay. When I got home the next morning, I found that the Giants had won two of three, the Rockies had ceased to be a threat, Mat Latos was a doofus and an asshole, and the Giants were in the driver's seat in the NL West. Not only that, but I had nabbed tickets at the last second for Wednesday's Giants game.

Expecting a festive atmosphere, I certainly got one. With hungry Giants fans everywhere yearning for something to go crazy about, Pat Burrell delivered by launching one into the section next to us, sending the bleachers into a high-fiving frenzy. It was one of the most exciting moments of my Giants fan lifetime. With that homer, the Dbacks looked totally demoralized, and the outcome seemed inevitable.

Now I roll back into Mays Field tonight and I'm greedy. None of this delaying the inevitable BS. I want a clincher. I'll be there with 40,000 other raving mad Giants fans, screaming my head off for the first playoff berth since 2003. It's going to be a rockin' one in China Basin tonight.

Friday Fairy Tale

2010-09-17T16:52:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, in the land known as Stankeye, there lived a man named Paulie. Now, Paulie had devoted everything short of his very soul to the baseball team known as the San Francisco Giants, and his undying love for the team was matched by very few. For a time, deep down Paulie had a soft spot for another team, the Milwaukee Brewers, who mostly stayed in the far-off land known as the American league.

This fondness stemmed from the days when Paulie was a young baseball card collector, obsessively organizing boxes and boxes of cards, sorted by team and player. Amongst all of his cards, he had a particular affinity for the players on the Brewers. Maybe it was the cool logo. Paulie was awestruck when he opened a new card pack to reveal heroic and colorful Brewer players such as Paul Molitor, Robin Yount, Jim Gantner, Gorman Thomas, and even big Joey Meyer, whom Bill James once described as "kind of gross". A shift by the Brewers to the National League briefly threatened Paulie's mild affection for the Brew Crew, but the memories of Harvey's Wallbangers held strong.

Then, one day, the Brewers' obese Prince smashed a walk-off home run against the Giants. This displeased Paulie, but it wasn't enough to break the cease-fire. Then, as the obese Prince came home into the waiting arms of his teammates, he engaged in a home run celebration that some might call "obnoxious", or "bush league", or "asshole-ish".

As the obese Prince leapt upon home plate, creating a cascading ripple effect amongst his waiting teammates, his ample girth shook not only the surrounding five-mile radius, but also the foundations of Paulie's now-shaky alliance with the Brewers. The resulting quake was so strong that said alliance crumbled to the ground, never to put back together again.

Even with this, Paulie thought it over and was prepared for peace the next year. In Spring Training, Barry Zito issued a warning shot to the obese Prince to indicate that Paulie was displeased. This, Paulie believed, would drive some sense back into the Brewers and re-establish the long-held peace between the two teams. Alas, the obese Prince would not back down, and after the Prince's strange, belligerent post-game rantings, Paulie made preparations for war.

When the Giants descended upon Milwaukee for the first time in 2010, the battle plans had been drawn months before finally came to fruition. The Giants went in to the land of beer and sausage and did what any team would do when shown up by a vastly inferior opponent: they beat the ever-loving shit out of them. There was Shock. There was Awe. The obese Prince's kingdom was burned and pillaged. His jesters were beaten. Paulie wept tears of joy. There was much rejoicing in the land of Stankeye.

Now the reanimated remnants of the obese Prince's kingdom stands in the way of Giants and the division title. Luckily, Paulie trained his warriors in the fine art of Zombie-killing. With two weeks left in the season, only a Brewers sweep and a run to the NL West championship would make the land of Stankeye live happily ever after.

--The Giants ended their season series against the Dodgers last night in fine fashion, smoking them 10-2 behind the strength of three home runs and a 12-strikeout performance by Jonathan Sanchez. The Giants win the matchup with the Dodgers this year, 10-8, which is astonishing considering the Giants lost five of the first six games against their evil counterparts. Three of those wins were late-innings humiliations for the Dodgers, so that just sweetens the tea. What a great year in Giant-Dodger history.

--Tomorrow is the 13th anniversary of this...

That it was so long ago makes me feel extraordinarily old, but it's one of the great moments of my life as a baseball fan. It seems like just yesterday that I was jumping up and down in excitement upon hearing Ted Robinson's home run call on the radio.

--Edit: I just caught this, but it's too good to let pass by the weekend. When a grown man accuses you of having "poopy in your pants", I'm not sure whether you should be insulted or just weirded out.

In the Words of King Leonidas...

2010-09-14T23:09:00.000-07:00

What can you do?

The Giants gave up one hit tonight. One hit! That, plus only one unearned run. One measly unearned run. Barry Zito pitched his best game in a while and the bullpen made short work of the Dodger hitters. Yet they still lost.

Games like this will happen. Clayton Kershaw is the real deal, as loathe as I am to say that about any Dodger, and he wasn't effing around tonight. Knowing the recent incompetence of Jonathan Broxton and rest of the Dodger bullpen, Joe Torre would have been sent to the nuthouse had he even contemplated taking Kershaw out for one of his lesser staffmates in the later innings. Thus, unlike this magical game in July, it was beat Kershaw or go home. The way Kershaw was rolling in the eighth and ninth, it was clear the Giants would be getting home long before the Strong Guy, the Fat Guy, and the Genius came on. I can take heart in two things: one, that the fast game enables me to get this post up so I'm not typing away in the wee hours; and two, that the Giants won't have to even look at Kershaw again in the year 2010.

So instead of dwelling on tonight's blink-and-you'll-miss-it loss, I'm going to look forward to tomorrow's game, and throw out a few links.

-I'm a big, dumb nerd for two things in life: baseball and The Simpsons. So imagine my glee when I came across this article by Chris Jaffe, in which he matches each major league team to a Simpsons character. This is like a match made in heaven for me, like if U2 and The Police teamed up (oh, wait). He even mentions Kang and Kodos. That's just awesome.

The Giants get Groundskeeper Willie, but I think I'd prefer an association with Chester Lampwick more. Lampwick was the guy who came up with Itchy and Scratchy, only to be thrown into a life of poverty when another bastard stole his idea. Like Lampwick, the Giants are trying to reclaim past glory (the titles they won in New York) that another bastard stole from them (the Dodgers, and the titles they won when they moved to LA). Let's hope a 2010 World Series win is their equivalent to a rocket car.

*Nerd U2 rant here, so feel free to bypass this next blurb, all non-believers. In their last show in Zurich, U2 ripped out this obscure and totally awesome song (their best song of the entire decade of the 2000's, in my opinion) for the first time ever, which warmed the hearts of obsessive U2 fanboys such as myself. The version they premiered is altered a little, and it's clunkier, cheesier, and Bono fucks up the lyrics...but it still kicks ass. Give it a look if you like the band and want to check out something different from them.

-From Jonah Keri, the former BP-ite, comes this great article about the Texas Rangers and the new workout regimen Team President Nolan Ryan has imposed on the team's pitchers. Tired of watching pitching prospects get endlessly babied, (and with no drop in pitching injuries to correlate with this coddling), the strikeout king has insisted that in order to breed healthier pitchers, these pitchers have to be able to build up endurance. Thus, he's making them throw more long toss, run constant wind sprints, and throw batting practice in between starts. It may seem a bit counterintuitive in these days of the conservative pitch count, but the early returns (the Rangers started this in early 2009) have been pretty positive. It's a long read, but well worth it.

-From the AL Cy Young debate, we get the good and the bad. The Good: Aaron Gleeman, on Felix Hernandez's brilliance and why Joe Morgan still doesn't get it. The Bad: Don Amore outthinking himself trying to lift C.C. Sabathia and Clay Buchholz above King Felix. While we're at it here's The Ugly, featuring some bizarre logic that would crown Sabathia the MVP (?!?).

Weekend Recap

2010-09-12T22:18:00.000-07:00

Well, that went well. I told myself before the weekend series with the Padres that if the team split the four games, I'd be happy. Instead, after the Giants took the first two games, Greedy Paulie reared his head and I was demanding a sweep and a pillaging of Petco Park. The Giants ended up taking three of four, and are now locked in a virtual tie for first place. This time tomorrow, they could have first place all by themselves, as they sit idle while the Padres limp into Coors Field to play a piping hot Rockies team, a team that will probably end up representing the Giants' Next Great Threat.

Going in to the series in San Diego, I was cautiously optimistic, despite the Giants' misery against the Pads this year. In retrospect, I should have been bloody enthusiastic. I didn't take two major factors into account. One, that the Padres are truly playing like crap. I mean, you have to see it first-hand to grasp the magnitude of the Padres' current suckiness. They aren't hitting, they're making stupid mistakes (i.e. Miguel Tejada's general idiocy on Friday and Luis Durango's flub of a fly ball today), and they look like a team beaten just based on their body language. In short, they appear to be toast. That isn't to say that they won't recover and rub the Giants' faces in it, but right now they look like a spent force.

The second factor I didn't take into account for this series was that the Giants would be basically playing four games in front of a home crowd. Today was especially egregious, but all four games featured crowds that appeared to have at least as many Giant fans as Padre fans, and loud chants of "Let's Go Giants!" were rarely drowned out. Hell, on Friday, some guy was watching the game during his wedding party in a condo across the street, and he had a bunch of Giants banners strewn out.

Game 1: I didn't pick up this game until late, but I didn't really need to, because literally the second I got home and turned on the TV, Pat Burrell launched a ball to where no baseball has ever gone before, and the Giants cruised to an easy win. Four home runs, early scoring, and a near-complete game win from Matt Cain? It was pure beauty having taken on the form of a baseball game.

Game 2: An ugly one, but a win nonetheless. Jonathan Sanchez slogged through one of those starts that promotes chain smoking (he walked seven in five innings), but the Giants pulled it out thanks to Aubrey Huff's hustle (or bad baserunning, take your pick) and a Miguel Tejada brainfart.

Also in the game, Brian Wilson pulled out another multi-inning save like it was clockwork. The save stat is stupid, yes, but having a shut-down bullpen guy who can come in and throw multiple innings and then demand to have the ball back the next night is far from overrated. I used to be a prime Wilson skeptic, but I've been converted into a true believer. Any time he's employed like the relief specialists of yore, it puts a smile on my face.

Game 3: The Padres can thank three people for their victory yesterday: Tim Stauffer, the starting pitcher, Yorvit Torrealba, who hit the deciding home run, and Jerry Crawford, the home plate umpire with the asinine strike zone. To be fair, Crawford was calling it both ways and Stauffer was exploiting it nicely. At some point though, you have to stop calling pitches that are a foot off the plate strikes. Why? Because that's not a freaking strike, in any league on any planet. On the FOX broadcast, Eric Karros kept harping about the strike calls on Buster Posey, and how he wasn't going to get them because he was a rookie. That's ridiculous enough if true, but the bad strike zone was in effect for everybody, and the Giants were the recipients of some particularly bad calls. And yes, I am whining.

Game 4: I had a sense of dread going into this one, but that went away when Posey lined a home run off of Giant-killer Mat Latos, a small bit of revenge for the smashing of Dave Flemming's sun roof. All-in-all, Latos labored through four innings and the Giants cruised to an easy win, capped in hilarious fashion when Luis Durango dropped an easy fly ball in center field, allowing the Giants' sixth run to score.

What a wonderful weekend for an exorcism. The Giants chased away some major Padre demons and come away with a 7-3 road trip. They get the Dodgers after a day off tomorrow. The Dodgers have given up on their season, and it shows, but they're certainly going to show up when the opportunity arises to screw the Giants, so the next three games won't be a picnic.

Flashback: Spring Training 2009

2010-09-06T23:21:00.000-07:00

Let's rev up the DeLorean and take a trip all the way back to Spring of 2009, a time when the Giants hadn't sniffed a winning season in seemingly forever. In an attempt to add depth to their middle infield (and after finding other, Bocockian options unsatisfactory), the Giants signed utilityman and erstwhile White Sox cast off Juan Uribe to a minor league deal. Many fans, if they had any reaction at all, simply shrugged off the move as an irrelevance. Your friend, Paulie, on the other hand, was frothing at the mouth and ready to go on a Brian Sabean-destroying rampage.

Let's be perfectly clear on this. I absolutely hated the Juan Uribe pickup back when it happened. Hated it. I believe I had some pretty uncomplimentary things to say right here. Uribe was coming off of a horrible 2008 in which he helped kill the White Sox in the playoffs with his hopeless flailing (he was replacing the injured Joe Crede at third base). He also hadn't been any good at the plate in three years, and by all measures his defense was on the decline. His 2006 season offered one of the most grotesquely bizarre hitting lines you'll ever see, as Uribe hit 21 home runs but walked just thirteen times and put up a hideous .257 OBP.

Some assumed he'd just be brought in as a part-timer or a warm body in Spring to prevent Emmanuel Burriss from getting too complacent as he fought for the everyday second base job. I wasn't fooled, though. Knowing the history of Brian Sabean and Bruce Bochy and their love for veterans and that magical grit or whatever other strange, baseball-savvy odor they emit, I knew Uribe was going to get way too many at-bats. I hated the signing like few others, despite it's relative low risk. As the 2009 season dawned, I sat back and waited for Uribe to fail, fingers poised over keyboard with evil intentions in mind.

My how things have changed. One thing is assured when you get into the business of being an armchair expert, typing nonsensical, drunken ravings about the Giants in your underwear at hideous hours of the morning: you're going to be wrong quite a bit. Uribe still employs that beer league softball swing, but when he uses that swing to belt game-winning bombs off of obese Dodger relief pitchers in critical stretch drive games, well...it's never felt so good to be so frickin' wrong about a player.

--I loved seeing Nate Schierholtz be the hero in today's extra-inning win over Arizona. His 11th-inning frozen rope triple plated the winning runs, and this only a few innings after he was picked off first base in embarrassing fashion by Dbacks catcher Miguel Montero. I've ranted and raved over the past two weeks about how I think Schierholtz should get more starts because of his glove (he hasn't started a game since late-July), and hits like today's might provide the incentive for Bruce Bochy to get him in the lineup and tack Jose Guillen's worthless butt to the bench.

--After today's stellar showing, Madison Bumgarner now has a tiny 2.25 ERA in eight starts on the road, as opposed to a less-than-sparkling 5.24 ERA at home. This is probably a complete fluke, as most pitchers tend to pitch better at home than on the road (not to mention Bum's home ERA is inflated a little by that gawdawful start against Cincinnati). Still, I demand that, until further notice, we stop referring to Bumgarner as MadBum, and instead bestow him with the moniker "Mad Max". As in, The Road Warrior.

Oh hell yeah...

Why the Giants Can Catch the Padres

2010-09-04T15:05:00.000-07:00

*Blogger's Note: I had this entire post nearly completed yesterday afternoon, but then my Internet crapped out and I had to delay it until today. If some of the content seems dated by a day because I'm too lazy to edit it, well...apologies.

About two weeks ago, when the Giants grabbed Cody Ross on waivers, ostensibly to block the Padres from getting him, some wags in the media, including one of my favorite columnists, questioned whether the Giants should even be worried about the Padres at all. At that point, they were six games back, I think, and just coming off of that horrid loss against Jaime Garcia in St. Louis. Although the Giants were about as down in the dirt as you can possibly get at that point (and as many reactionary KNBR callers were getting their nooses ready), even the most hardened naysayers should know that a month left in the season is enough time for a lot of things to happen. Now, of course, such claims that the Giants should give up the division race look downright silly.

The Giants enter Hades for a three game set with the Dodgers, and they are now just three games back in the division. The Padres are suddenly reeling, having now lost eight in a row. The odds of winning the division are still against the Giants, but now they have the momentum, as well as some other factors that spill in their favor. Here are a few reasons to be optimistic about the team's chances of catching the Pads down the stretch.

-They're only three games back with a month to play. Ok, so the easy one first. Not only is there a lot of baseball left to be played, but the Giants and Padres play seven more times down the stretch, including a final series in San Francisco which could set the stage for some major drama. Of course, the Padres have had the Giants' number this year, but given the way the Padres have played of late, the tide could turn very easily.

-The Padres have a rough schedule. Certainly rougher than the Giants', anyway. From here on out, the only team the Pads face with a losing record will be the Cubs. On top of that, they have a four-game set in St. Louis, smack in the middle of a ten-game road trip that will also take them to Coors Field. That ain't fun. When they get back from that road trip, they get the Reds, who currently have the best record in the NL. Compare that to the Giants, who get the Dbacks six times, and also one series each against the Cubs and Brewers.

-The Giants' offense is as good as it has been in, well, six years. Gone are the days when we would just assume a ground ball double play would occur whenever the Giants strung two hits together in the late innings. The Giants now have some legitimate thump in their lineup, for the first time since, yes, 2004. Aubrey Huff, Buster Posey, and Pat Burrell are the three imposing middle-of-the-order hitter we've been yearning for for years. Freddy Sanchez and Pablo Sandoval look like they're starting to heat up, too. Combine that with Andres Torres continuing to rake at the top of the order, and added punch from Cody Ross against lefties, and this is the most potent lineup the Giants have had since Bonds left.*

*Blogger's Note; Uh, yeah, this was written before the Giants got shut down by Chad Billingsley. Let's just whistle our way past that for now...

-The Padre offense is still terrible. Even with the additions of Miguel Tejada (who is basically crappy, anyway) and Ryan Ludwick (he isn't), the Padres still have a hard time scoring runs. They can't blame it on the ballpark this time, either, as they score just as many runs at home as they do on the road. They rank near the bottom in nearly every hitting category and only really boast one scary, game-changing hitter in Adrian Gonzalez. Other than him, there are a lot of Will Venables (though to be fair, Venable's middling .705 OPS actually merits a 100 ERA+ in that crazy ballpark).

-The Padres' pitching might be built on a house of cards. The Padres have had tremendous pitching thus far but, with the exception of the freaking studly Matt Latos, have also had a lot of good fortune. That's not inherently bad, of course, but it does mean that a semi-collapse could occur at a moment's notice, if it hasn't already.

Take Jon Garland. He's having a hell of a year at first glance, with a 3.29 ERA to go with 13 wins and a lot of solid innings munched. If we get a little nerdier, however, we can see that he's living on a shaky foundation, if not one built on a flood plain with crumbling levies. First off, Garland's career ERA is a decidedly averagish 4.33, so his current low mark already screams insane fluke. Some of the success comes from Garland being a fly ball pitcher playing in the vast spaces of Petco, but much of it is due to just plain luck, and pitching in front of a good defense.

Garland's xFIP (for you non-dweebs, it's essentially ERA dictated by factors a pitcher can control), is 4.54. Now, that's a lot more in line with his career totals. Sure enough, if you look at most of the other Padre starters, including Wade LeBlanc, a pitcher with a similar repertoire to Garland, you'll see that their xFIPs are substantially higher than their ERAs (excepting, interestingly enough, awful Kevin Correia, who has an xFIP way lower than his actual ERA). This doesn't necessarily mean that a correction in Garland's ERA will occur over the course of the last month; it's just extremely likely, given his fielding independent stats and his history. Likewise, most of the Padre starters look likely to regress given a simple reversal of luck or the loss of a key defensive player. Hey, speaking of which...

-Gone with the Gwynn. The Padres recently lost Tony Gwynn Jr. to injury, and he'll be gone until at least the last week of the season, if he isn't completely done for the year. Now, Gwynn is having a miserable year at the plate and has never been a very good hitter, so why, you ask, would his loss have any kind of effect on the Pads? Well, because he might be the best defensive center fielder in the league. Yes, Gwynn's UZR rating is 13.1, meaning, essentially, that he's saved 13 runs more than an average center fielder. That number is insane when you realize that Gwynn hasn't even really played every day.

With him gone, the Padres have to live with lesser glove talents in their outfield (Gwynn's injury shows why they may have had interest in Cody Ross), and that could be a major impediment for a team that has relied on the best defense in the NL for a lot of their success. Never underestimate the value of a guy like Gwynn to a team full of fly ball pitchers playing in a ballpark with an expansive outfield.

I have a sinking feeling that I'm jinxing the Giants with this "hell, this is why the Padres suck and will collapse" post. In my mind, I've had a long and sordid history of jinxing the team, from continuing to record Game Six of the 2002 World Series even as the Giants started falling apart, to staring too long at the waitress's cleavage at a sports bar during a key game last year. So I'm seriously tempting fate here.

Still, this isn't to say that the Padres are terrible and are guaranteed to fall apart. They've been doing this for too long to simply reveal themselves to be a total fluke this late in the game. These are just some reasons why Giants fans should like their chances of making this an interesting September. And wouldn't you know it, as I write this, the Pads are in the process of losing their ninth straight game.

Giants Rubber, Rockies Glue

2010-08-31T22:11:00.000-07:00

Here's a quick list of the Giants' starting pitching options on Opening Day, ranked in order of how much confidence they instilled.

1) Tim Lincecum
2) Matt Cain
3) Barry Zito
4) Jonathan Sanchez
.
.
.
10) Madison Bumgarner
.
.
.
105) J.T. Snow inexplicably brought out of retirement again and throwing with his right hand.
.
.
.
278) Todd Wellemeyer
_____

Now here's a similar list that reflects the level of confidence I have in each pitcher as of this very moment.

1) Matt Cain
2) Madison Bumgarner
3) Jonathan Sanchez
4) Barry Zito
5) Tim Lincecum
.
.
.
2,758) Todd Wellemeyer

I never thought, in a million years, that I'd be jotting down a list like that (except for the Wellemeyer part). Lincecum at the bottom? Back at the start of the season, my retort to that thought would be something like this. That's right, other than Cain (who is basically the team's unquestioned ace at this point), there's no other pitcher I'd want on the mound for the Giants in a big game besides Bumgarner. That's ahead of the up-and-down Sanchez, and the suddenly awful Zito and Timmy. It's certainly a far cry from Spring Training, when fans were wringing their hands over the Mad Bum's missing velocity.

This isn't to say that I don't think Lincecum will start pitching well again (I do) or that Zito won't recover from his recent foibles (more iffy on that one), but as of now Bumgarner is the team's second best-pitcher, last week's blowup against the Reds notwithstanding. It also helps that he can rake, as his key double in tonight's game can attest.

The mood tonight stands in sharp contrast to this time yesterday, when I was pretty much on the brink of this level of madness. Now the Giants have crept back to within four games of the suddenly reeling Padres, and all seems well. What bad loss? I have no such knowledge. When Andres Torres is hitting bolts over the right field bricks and Buster Posey is gunning down runners with laser beam throws (hideous managerial decision by Jim Tracy, amazing throw by Posey), it helps erode a fan's short-term memory.

Kudos, too, to the players for coming out and playing well despite the totally demoralizing loss from the previous night. Just for a fan like me who sits in his boxers and throws Fruit Loops at the TV, a loss like that is enough to start drafting the 2010 season's eulogy. I can't even imagine what it's like for the players who have to go back out there the next night and pretend nothing happened. That's why they're the professionals.

Wait...We Won That Game, Right?

2010-08-30T22:00:00.000-07:00

Sigh.

Tonight's loss is the kind that promotes heavy drinking, and not just the kind that involves a tear-stained six pack to get you through the night. I'm talking about a week-long bender that ends in a ravaged motel room with scorched bed sheets and a thin layer of strange green liquid congealing over the floor. It feels as though there has been an inordinate number of games like this in 2010. Something about Giants baseball being torture?

I was all ready with a fawning post over Jonathan Sanchez's awesome game and my incredible love-hate relationship with him, but the delete key took over the second Cody Ross fumbled Carlos Gonzalez's long drive to right-center field. Just a disgusting loss, and now suddenly the Giants have to worry about not only the Padres, Phillies, Braves, and Cardinals in the pennant chase, but also the effing Rockies as well. Excuse me while I go bludgeon my TV with a lava lamp.

I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record on this crap, but what on Earth is Nate Schierholtz doing rotting on the bench in the ninth inning there? Now, I can't say for sure if Schierholtz wouldn't have mistaken a broken bat for a baseball on that play, but I'm certain he sure as hell would have looked a lot better out there than Ross, who took about three steps in and then watched Gonzalez's liner sail over his head. Ross has a (possibly dubious) reputation as a good fielder, but anyone who can read defensive statistics knows Nate is the real thing. Why even have him around if he's not going to come in for situations exactly like that in the ninth inning tonight?

Perhaps I'm overreacting, but man, what a way to kill what was turning into a satisfying night. Bah!

Catharsis

2010-08-23T22:43:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry, but the Reds never had a chance in this one. Returning home from a bad road trip and coming off of one of their worst games all year, the Giants let out all of their pent up rage on poor Edinson Volquez. Someone had to pay for the way the Giants were treated by Jaime Garcia, and there was poor Volquez, standing innocently in front of the oncoming buzzsaw, none the wiser. Volquez had no control from the start and was battered around like a big ass pinata, leaving with a fraction for an innings pitched total and an ERA that's going to wake up in the morning hungover and covered in strange green slime.

Noted .500 pitcher Matt Cain (I'm sorry, but I just can't get over that) pitched like a bull tonight, going eight strong and allowing only two runs. Of all the hitting stars, I give the game ball to Freddy Sanchez, who rapped out four hits. Sanchez has been a whole lot of miserable for a good two months now, so any sign that he can get his bat going is a welcome one. If he can hit like he did with Pittsburgh last season (.776 OPS) over the last month, that's a bug asset, and I don't think that's too much to ask. Lastly, the Buster Posey man-crush continues to grow after two more hits tonight and no sign of letup. This could start to get creepy very soon.

-Late in tonight's game, the Giants brought in Cody Ross and Nate Schierholtz to act as defensive replacements, prompting Mike Krukow to start fawning over the incredible range this outfield now featured. Krukow stated that it was the best defensive outfield the Giants had trotted out since 1993, with Barry Bonds, Darren Lewis, and Willie McGee.

It's a good defense, for sure, but I beg to disagree, mostly because there's little evidence that Ross is all that good of a center fielder. So I guess it's two-thirds of a great defensive outfield, with one guy who most defensive metrics regard as pretty blah. Fair enough. It's better than the unsightly Pat Burrell/Jose Guillen corner combo that makes babies cry.

With this in mind, I feel the need to come out and say that I'm a big Schierholtz supporter, despite his limp bat. His glove is rated as a ridiculous 7.8 runs better than a normal right fielder, according to UZR, and Sean Smith's Total Zone Rating has him regarded highly as well. He and Andres Torres have probably been two of the best defensive players in the league this season, and have been a major part of the reason why the pitching has been so good thus far.

Which means he needs to play. I'm sorry but whatever gains Jose Guillen gives the team with the bat (and I question whether they're too substantial) are mostly taken away by his horrid fielding. The guy is like a frickin' statue out there (hopefully not one exposing itself to a whole city, though), and with the Giants and their staff full of fly ball pitchers, I'd argue that Schierholtz's glove has been a big part of the team's success so far this year. Is it any coincidence that their pitching has largely sucked since Guillen started getting regular at-bats?

Also, who knows, maybe Schierholtz will find his stroke with regular playing time again. Part of this insistence on playing him is based on the fact that I can't stand Guillen, but I think getting Nate's glove back in the outfield alongside Torres will be a big key to making the playoffs, crappy hitting or no.

-In the plugging universe, I should mention that Chris Jaffe of The Hardball Times has written an article, inspired by the semi-comical cycle accomplished by our old friend Bengie Molina, listing the most unlikely cycles of all time. Molina, of course, makes the cut (I literally thought the Giants announcers were joking when they mentioned he had hit for the cycle that day), but some of the other names provide a fun look at middling hitters throughout baseball history. There is one other former Giant on the list, as well as the only member of the old Harvey's Wallbanger Brewers teams who couldn't actually bang the wall.

Why the Dark Before the Dawn?

2010-08-22T23:01:00.001-07:00

I spent the day watching the A's play Tampa in Oakland, so I was spared having to witness the Giants getting blasted by the Cardinals this morning. I could only sit and watch the carnage ensue on the Oakland Coliseum scoreboard, with steam shooting from my ears as run after run racked up on the St. Louis side. The score tells the tale, and I flat out refuse to look at the box score. There's nothing that needs to be said about it. I'm taking the good advice of the ostrich and looking for a big pile of sand to stick my head in. The less I know about that game, the better. Ignorance is bliss, and so forth.

On the way home, I had the misfortune of tuning in to the nonsensical bleating on KNBR. My brain, needless to say, is none the better for it. It was the usual knee-jerk, doom and gloom stuff, complete with inane trade talk and the calling out of players who don't deserve it. One guy suggested that the Giants should trade Barry Zito to the Cardinals for Albert Pujols this offseason. Great idea, except that I doubt that the Cardinals want to trade arguably the best player in the National League for the right to pay Zito $20 million for the next three years. Also, some guy called out Matt Cain for being "at the end of the day, just a .500 pitcher" and thought it advisable to trade him because of this fact. Just an epic facepalm.

Times seem tough for our heroes in the Orange in Black, but amidst the end-is-nigh woe from the KNBR whiners and their ilk, let me regale you with a story, from waaaaaay back in the year 2002. I personally attended this crappy game at Mays Field, a contest in which the Giants lost to the Vladimir Guerrero-led Expos and Livan Hernandez got his ample ass handed to him. At the end of the game, things looked grim. The Giants were 70-58, they were floundering around in third place, barely alive in both the division and the Wild Card race, and it looked like another disappointing season was in the works. Watching Livan pitch can kill your morale worse than being dumped, I tell you. This was in late August.

So what happened? The Giants immediately ripped off seven wins in a row and stormed to the Wild Card and eventually the pennant. They would overtake the Dodgers for good a mere two weeks later. Any thought of that dark day against Montreal has been wiped away in a sea of Kenny Lofton liners to the outfield.

Obviously the past week or so has been brutal, but let's put things in perspective here. The Giants just lost a tough series at home against the Padres. They didn't play well, and lost the series because of it. Fair enough. Then they had to embark on a brutal road swing against two of the better teams in the league, smack in the middle of the dog day of August. Few teams are going to come away from that unscathed.

Now they have nine straight at home, and their schedule from here on out includes a decent amount of subpar teams. Meanwhile, the Padres' schedule is about to get pretty rough, with most of their games against good teams, including a four-game set against St. Louis. Also, if the Milwaukee series is any indication, some of the good luck that San Diego's starting staff has been receiving all year may be running out.

The Giants have issues, moreso than can be solved by pointless acquisitions of Cody Ross. The defense is looking porous, the hitting is still shows up when it feels like, and the Tim Lincecum crisis has entered its third week. It's not time to panic, though. Even with the red hot Reds coming into town, I can definitely see a little home cooking touching off a nice winning streak. It's happened before this season, and there's no reason it can't happen now. With noted ".500 pitcher" Cain going tomorrow, I like the chances of getting this season back on the right foot. So please, fair KNBR callers, put a halt to the histrionics and stop rotting my brain.

--Regarding Cody Ross, I realize the Giants only have him because they put in a waiver claim to block San Diego from acquiring him (and because the perpetually cheap Marlins were all to happy to let the Giants take his salary off their hands). My question is: what evidence is there that Ross would have actually helped the Padres? He's basically Aaron Rowand with the bat, and his defense has not been particularly good the past two years, at least according to UZR and WAR. The Giants obviously wanted to prevent the Pads from upgrading more, and Ross is a potent bat against lefties, but now they just created a big roster fiasco, and I'm afraid our poor friend Nate Schierholtz, he of the great glove and cannon arm, might be forced out by this mess.

Dirty Sanchez Is No Carnac

2010-08-16T22:19:00.001-07:00

Calling out your division rival and providing bulletin board material before a big series is always a sketchy proposition. Guaranteeing a sweep is never a wise thing to do (or guaranteeing anything in baseball, for that matter). Proceeding to go out and pitch like crap immediately after making said statements is a good way to make yourself look like a damn fool. Enter Jonathan Sanchez, who did a lot of talking before the San Diego series (he insisted the Giants would sweep the Padres) and then touched off an ugly weekend with a shaky start in which he couldn't hold an early 2-0 lead. His powers of prognostication proved to be Uri Geller-quality (as in, not good) right when Aubrey Huff's blast died in the center fielder's glove in the eighth inning on Friday night.

Sanchez's bloviating notwithstanding, this was an ugly series. The Giants were probably lucky to even win the one game, and another bad Tim Lincecum start killed any hopes that the Giants could gain ground in the division this weekend. The Padres' offense is notably scarier after the deadline deals they made, but they still don't have anything resembling a great offense, and they beat the Giants to death with a barrage of dinks and doinks all weekend (though that will happen when you have Pat Burrell and Jose Guillen patrolling the outfield). To make matters worse, the main Giant-killing culprit this series was Miguel Tejada, who is one of the whiniest players I've ever seen and is one of my least favorites of all-time (Brandon Phillips' comments last week apply to him much more than to the Cardinals).

It was just ugly all around, with the Giants constantly playing from behind, something you just can't do against San Diego's pitching staff. The Padres won again tonight, so the Giants stumble into a rough six-game road trip against the Phillies and Cardinals four games back in the NL West and with an ace who is as clueless as you and me as to why he suddenly can't pitch. Joy. On the bright side, this hellish-looking week is followed by nine straight games at home.

-So the sky fell and Jose Guillen is a Giant. The same guy who got sent home for the 2004 playoffs by his own team, despite being their second-leading home run hitter, is now here to grace the Giants' clubhouse with his own brand of belligerence. On the bright side, the Giants got Guillen for a song. A Neil Diamond song, sung off key, so if he throws one of his patented tantrums, he'll be kicked off the team faster than you can say "Pierzynski".

The upside here is that he provides some power and a needed offensive charge but, really, when was the last time he was a good major league hitter? 2007 with Seattle? That was his only good year with the bat since 2005. The positive aspects of bringing this guy into the clubhouse seem incredibly farfetched. It didn't take long for him to draw the ire of Giant fans when, in his first Orange and Black start, he was thrown out trying to stretch a double into a triple. He accomplished this while leading off an inning, with the team down four runs, and managed to look like the world's slowest human being in doing so, an amazing feat on a team with Pat Burrell and Aubrey Huff.

-In non-Giants related news, for anyone who finds the "#6org" snark as endlessly entertaining as I do, it looks like the issue has come full circle, as Dave Cameron has finally decided to confront his critics on the whole situation. It's a battle royale that provides some insight into why these bizarre, nerdy Internet battles (of which I happily admit to following) can often be so entertaining.

For those who aren't hip to the history of the "6org" madness...back in March, Cameron posted an article on Fangraphs in which he claimed that the Seattle Mariners were the sixth-best organization in baseball. This now looks completely insane, of course, since the Mariners are on pace to lose 100 games, but even back then it seemed overly optimistic. It didn't help that Cameron runs a Mariners blog and this just made him look like a total homer.

Well, Cameron is lauded in many circles for his insightful analysis, but ripped to pieces in many others for being a complete dick, and this was just the low-hanging fruit his detractors were looking for (besides this bit of strangeness). When it became clear that the Mariners were going to stink, a classic Internet meme was born. Ever since April or so, whenever the Mariners make a dumb move, which has been quite often, people mention it on Twitter and attach the "#6org" hashtag to it. Some might find it petty, but I choose to find it awesome to no end.

The Mike Fontenot Era Begins With a Bang

2010-08-11T22:38:00.000-07:00

The Giants continued to have problems with the Cubs tonight, blowing an early 3-0 lead before finally scraping out a 5-4 win on another late-inning home run by Pat Burrell, who is seeming like less a player than some kind of season-saving angel riding in from the clouds. It's frustrating to watch the Giants having such a hard time beating a Cubs team that looks like it can't wait for the season to hurry up and end, but a win is a win. Much-maligned Aaron Rowand also came through with a big home run, and the Giants got typically excellent relief work from Sergio Romo and Brian Wilson to seal the deal.

So the Giants hang with the Padres for another game, which is all they can really hope to do until Friday, since the Pads are busy kicking the crap out of a hopeless Pittsburgh team. On the heels of tonight's win, let's welcome the newest member of the Orange and Black. Into the torture baseball fray comes utility infielder Mike Fontenot, last seen killing the Giants with a late-inning RBI double...um, last night. Yep, all Fontenot had to do was run across the grass from dugout to dugout, as the Giants dealt a low-A infielder for him before tonight's game. With Edgar Renteria going on the disabled list, Fontenot provides a little added versatility and another left-handed bat off the bench.

Once upon a time, Fontenot looked like he could hit enough to be a regular. Yeah, a lot has changed since 2008. Fontenot learned the hard way what happens when your BABIP decides to come back to Earth, and he was miserable in way too many at-bats for the Cubs last season. This year he's been a little better, although his main asset to the Giants is that he isn't Emmanuel Burriss. As a minor trade to bolster the bench, I give it a courtesy clap. Hey. it's better than having a pea sprout in your lung.

The loss of Renteria means that the Giants no longer have to find him playing time in lieu of more at-bats from Juan Uribe. Uribe, as flawed as he may be, is still one of the Giants' most productive hitters and has no business losing plate appearances to the likes of Renteria and Freddy Sanchez. Unless Sanchez regains his hitting mojo, Fontenot will probably spell him against tough righties down the stretch, and with Renteria out the Giants don't have any excuses to sit Uribe and his potent bat.

Bad Times

2010-08-10T22:40:00.000-07:00

That game freaking sucked. Tim Lincecum didn't have it from pitch one, and after he coughed up four runs in the first, the Giants had to chase the Cubs from the bottom of the hill the entire game. To make matters worse, the Cubbies tried to hand the Giants tonight's contest several times, only to have the Giants hand it right back. In a display of some of the worst fielding you'll ever see in a major league game, the Cubs helped the Giants repeatedly climb back and make it close. Even fighting until the final inning, though, and even with the Cubs resembling a dancing clown act more than a major league team, the Giants still fell 8-6.

Lincecum's struggles tonight were bothersome, especially since he was all over the map in the first inning, with seemingly little clue where the ball was going. Even more bothersome is the fact that Lincecum has now surpassed his career high in home runs allowed, with two months still to go. Decreased velocity, declining strikeout rate, increased home run rate, and increased walk rate? It's not time to panic, but these are unsettling trends.

So I'm going to whistle my way past this game and assume the Giants can wring out three wins from this series. I suggest you do the same.

-While you're dealing with your depression from tonight's loss, here's something to terrify you. Why would anyone in their right mind think acquiring Jose Guillen would be a good idea? How many different ways are there to say no to this rumor? I can think of a few that involve the F word. Let's see...he's a notorious clubhouse cancer and he sucks. Oh, and Troy Percival famously called him an asshole in the book Fantasyland. Yeah, that's not exactly a guy who you want on your team down the stretch drive.

-From the Files of: You're a Big, Gigantic Pussy comes this hilarious highlight from last night's Astro game. At one point in the game, an Astros player hit a foul ball that headed right toward some guy sitting with his girlfriend in the stands. As the ball rocketed towards his girl, the poor loser lunged out of the way like a frightened chicken, and the ball nailed his girlfriend in the arm. The girl looked understandably pissed, while the guy claimed to have lost the ball in the lights. Yeah, dude, I used to use that excuse in Little League. Epic chivalry fail.

Inconceivable!

2010-08-03T22:52:00.000-07:00

Wait. Was that an easy win at Coors Field? Take it away, Vizzini. I didn't think these types of games existed. I've been trained to assume the worst in any Giants game played in Colorado. In tonight's game, even when the Giants plated four runs in the first inning, I figured the Rockies would drop a six-spot in the bottom of the frame to start the usual horror. When Aaron Cook got knocked out of the box, I just expected Taylor Buchholz to shut the offense down the rest of the way so the Rocks could mount a comeback. It's just the way it goes.

No such drama tonight. The Giants rapped out 19 hits, and by the time Andres Torres blasted his 11th home run to give the Giants a 10-0 lead, it just seemed cruel. It's not often these days you get to take sadistic pleasure in a vicious Giants beatdown of another team, especially not with this recent, low-offense incarnation, so games like tonight's are just fun. Enjoy it while it lasts, because another day brings another game in Coors Field and the potential for whole new parade of nightmares.

Hero of the day: They're everywhere, but I'm going to go with Freddy Sanchez for blasting his second home run of the season. Sanchez's work at the plate since the All-Star Break has been a clinic on how to not hit at the major league level, so if a little high altitude hitting can get his bat going, then we won't have to wonder why our number two hitter is OBPing .320.

Runner-up is Jonathan Sanchez for his brilliant work on the mound, at one point striking out seven straight Rockies to tie the San Francisco record. And to think some fans wanted to trade this guy for Corey Hart. For shame.

Wall Of Flake

2010-08-02T21:52:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting at home right now, watching a replay of the already-classic Don Mattingly gaffe game (or the Dodger Fail game, as I like to call it) from two weeks ago, which is nicely keeping my mind off of the fact that the Giants roll into Coors Field tomorrow. As elated as we are about the Giants' recent play, we all know the horrible, horrible things that happen in Colorado. Better not to think about it right now. Hey, Andres Torres just doubled in two runs on the TV. Yep, this works just like frickin' endorphins.

This weekend the Giants elected two more players to the Giants' Wall of Fame, which sits right outside Mays Field. Rich Aurilia and Shawn Estes, two key players from the Giants' 1997-2002 glory years, were enshrined on Saturday, seemingly cementing their statuses as Giants immortals. In order to make the Wall, a player has to either play at least nine seasons with the team, or play five seasons and have one All-Star berth. Both players made one All-Star appearance, with Estes making the team in 1997 (and serving up a bomb to Sandy Alomar Jr., no less), and Aurilia in 2001.

Aurilia's inclusion on the wall is a no-brainer. He is arguably the best shortstop in San Francisco Giants history and his 2001 season was one of the greatest for any shortstop in NL history. Plus, anybody sporting such a rocking goatee should be placed on any Wall of Fame just by default.

Estes, on the other hand, gives one pause, at least at upon initial reaction. After his awesome breakout 1997 year, in which he won 19 games with an ERA+ of 130, his lack of control and general flakiness got the better of him, and he fell off a cliff in the next two seasons. In 2000, he had an apparent resurgence, but his 15 wins were largely the by-product of pitching in front of an historically great offense and having an insane 40 double plays turned behind him. By 2001, the Giants had tired of his high walk totals and eventually turned him into The Man With the Orange Wristbands. Oh, and he once went on a joy ride with a stolen police bike. Genius, he may not be.

I can't decide. Do Giants fans generally remember Estes fondly, or with some animosity? His 1997 performance was a thing of beauty (I'll never forget listening to this game in my car as I left for a long Fourth of July vacation), but my lasting image of him will probably be him hobbling off of second base with the ball in play and being tagged out in Game 2 of the 2000 playoffs against the Mets. That kind of boneheadedness was sadly typical of Estes's career, and it's what drove us Giants fans up the wall. As good as his stuff was, he was just bound to implode in a sea of walks at any moment, and he was pretty much the last guy you wanted pitching in a big game. By the time he was traded away, I don't remember anyone being too sad to see him go.

So is he Wall of Fame-caliber? Well, I think the point of the Wall is more to pay tribute to Good Giants rather than simply legends like Willie Mays or Barry Bonds. If we're honoring players who made a legitimate impact on the franchise for an extended period of time, then Estes definitely qualifies. No one can talk about the magical 1997 team without mentioning the year Estes had, and there's no way in hell the Giants win the NL West without him. Plus, how can Estes not be on there when there's room for Randy Moffitt? Or Atlee Hammaker? Or Johnny Lemaster?

The day Livan Hernandez is enshrined, though, I'm outta here.

--As a postscript to the Estes talk, I would like to take all the credit for his All-Star 1997 season. During the previous offseason, Estes came to Sacramento for an autograph signing. Geeked up by his strong finish to the '96 season, I was there with my glossy 8' x 10'' photo and my baseball and a glimmer in my 14-year-old eye.

After Estes signed both of these items, and as my dad carted me away, I yelled "good luck next season" at him. He looked at me like I was insane and possibly intent on causing harm, but wouldn't you know it, he went on to have his best year in the majors. So yes, I consider myself Estes' good luck charm. The baseball he signed still sits on my shelf, but the photo sadly died a horrible death by being chewed up by cats.

Beaten LA

2010-08-01T22:05:00.000-07:00

Remember like a month ago when the Giants had just been swept by the Dodgers, and were about to embark on a long road trip, and it looked like their season was in a tailspin? Yeah, I don't either. Whether it be the result of willpower or heavy drinking, I've completely blocked that pont of time out of my memory. Wouldn't you know it, now the Giants are on top of the world, having kicked a sullen Dodger team while they were down. They suddenly look, with their pitching and Buster Posey-led offensive rebirth, like a force to be reckoned with in the National League.

Any sweep is a thing of beauty, but the way the Giants applied the broom to the Dodgers this weekend was equivalent to picking up what's left on the newspaper and rubbing their noses in it. With the series on the verge of turning in LA's favor, Pat Burrell launched a go-ahead home run off of the obese and suddenly ineffective Jonathan Broxton, single-handedly pile-driving the knife into the Dodgers' deathly-black hearts. After that, Matt Cain's symbolic win (he'd never beaten the Dodgers before) was merely a formality.

Series kudos go to, of course, all three Giants starters, for pitching gems in each game. To Burrell, for that home run that provided yet another moment this year that had me leaping out of my chair. Pat the Bat is clearly not the same guy he was with the Phils, and his defense is horrid, but this is what he'll give you. He's a guy who can turn a game with one swing of the bat late in the game, something the Giants have pined for in recent years. Points also to Edgar Renteria for his big hit tonight, and to Aubrey Huff, for being awesome in general and continuing to make me look like an idiot and an asshole for ripping his signing earlier.

--The Giants pulled off two trades, of the minor sort. In order to bolster the bullpen a little (because any Denny Bautista appearance makes us all want to take up smoking, stat), the team acquired Ramon Ramirez from Boston and Javier Lopez from Pittsburgh.

Ramirez is a relative obscurity, having toiled in Kansas City for most of his successful career, but he has been a solid pitcher over the past two years. His down year in 2010 is largely driven by an increased home run rate, something that should be helped by his new home ballpark. He provides some depth and is essentially a better version of Guillermo Mota. The Giants traded Daniel Turpen, a 23-year-old pitcher with mediocre peripherals in AA. Prospect mavens don't seem excited about him at all, so I doubt he'll be missed.

The Lopez trade is a little more goofy. I generally consider LOOGYs to be a waste of a roster spot, since they're only good enough to face one batter per game, and have to be hidden from righties at all costs. So I'm doubly aghast when the Giants trade for one, when generally these guys can be found on the scrap heap (remember Scott Eyre or, hell, Rich Rodriguez?). Lopez has put too many runners on base for a reliever, and he's actually been better against right-handers this year (yeah yeah, I know it's a fluke). His sidewinding delivery is cool and all, but he almost pitched himself out of baseball after a miserable 2009 and could only hook on with the listless Pirates this season. Pointless, I say.

As for the players the Giants gave up, John Bowker is the one who may make this look bad. He's 26 and hasn't figured it out at the major league level, but on a rebuilding team I could see him throwing together a couple of solid power years and inevitably killing the Giants with a big home run down the road. I'll certainly be rooting for him.

Martinez, even though he's a minor hero in Giant fan circles for returning so swiftly after taking a liner to the eye last year, is basically AAA fodder. Even though Bowker and Martinez are nothing to write home about, I still can't help but wonder why the Giants felt the need to throw two players in to get a one-dimensional, highly interchangeable left-handed pitcher. Oh well. Did I mention the Giants swept the Dodgers?

The Best Fail Is Dodger Fail

2010-07-21T21:51:00.000-07:00

Of all the things I expected out of the Giants in tonight's game, getting blanked on five hits wasn't one of them. Coming off a rousing, momentum-swinging win last night, I expected something like a 10-0 rout of Chad Billingsley, who had an ERA over five this season at Dodger Stadium coming into this start. I expected lots of hits, lots of brilliant pitching by Barry Zito, and Buster Posey walking upon the waters of Huntington Beach after the win.

I guess we can't have everything. Even tonight's loss, though, can't dampen the excitement of Giants baseball since the All-Star break, with the major highlight being the hilarity of Dodger Fail Night in the second game of the series in LA. You have to love a game in which the Dodgers are so insistent on pointless retaliation that it results in their manager, their bench coach, and their ace all being ejected from the game. All this led to Don Mattingly's ninth-inning blunder that forced George Sherrill to take the mound with the bases loaded. That's never a good thing, unless you're Andres Torres, who responded to Mattingly's gift by ripping a game-winning double of the wall.

Any time the Dodgers lose to the Giants, I sleep well for a week. Any time the Dodgers lose in horrible, horrible ways to the Giants, a family of four is fed for a month. That's the way I see it, anyway. Last night's game was the stuff that Dodger-hating dreams are made of. Any time I think back to one of those games at Mays Field when Dodger fans were taunting me as their team won, I'll immediately push those thoughts aside and think of Dodger Fail Night.

I'm not sure anybody noticed, but seemingly overnight, the Giants are a really fun team again. With Buster Posey and Madison Bumgarner in the majors and playing well, Bengie Molina's gigantic butt exiled to the American League, a starting pitching staff that is five-deep in quality arms, and a lineup that...well, isn't actually horrible, this team is playing an exciting brand of baseball. A far cry from the days of hoping the Giants' starting pitcher throws a 10-inning shutout during each start.

Blow Your House Down, Man

2010-06-16T22:18:00.000-07:00

Aubrey Huff. Slugger. Stud. Water buffalo. Way back in January in the Year of Our Lord 2010, I had some uncomplimentary things to say in this post about our friend Aubrey. I mainly focused on his miserable 2009, his poor defense, and his having a Christian name that is typically designated for girls. I'm sure there was some profanity involved, too. Well, now it's six months later and Huff is only the best damn hitter on the team. To blatantly rip off a joke from Bill Maher, I must be wearing orthopedic shoes, because I stand corrected.

For the purposes of defending my own crass pessimism, it's fair to ask just where exactly this hitting binge came from. No one expected him to even reach 11 home runs for the entire season, let alone by mid-June. Huff now sports a line of .305/.396/.541, which is MVP-level. If he sustains this production he'll be the best Giants first baseman (if he logs the most innings there, I guess) since Will Clark. He's walked more than he's struck out, extremely rare for a slugger, and he's in the middle of what is becoming the best season of his career. Unless he flies over and plugs the hole in the Gulf, I don't think this signing could have worked out any better.

All this after the baseball world had written him off after he didn't hit a lick in '09. In fact, before this season, Huff had been pretty unremarkable since 2004. After breaking in as one of Tampa Bay's few early prospects, Huff had three seasons from 2002 to 2004 that were All-Star-worthy. Starting in 2005, though, he came down with a bout of ordinariness, and in 2006 Tampa traded him to Houston for Ben Zobrist, in a swap that looked pointless then and seems absolutely horrific for the Astros now.

After being dealt, other than a very fluky-looking 2008 season, Huff basically became a 15-homer, bad-fielding first baseman, i.e. not a good player. So when Brian Sabean picked him up for a song and proclaimed him the middle-of-the-order home run machine of our dreams, we told him to pull the other one. Silly us.

Remember, the Huff pickup came only after Sabean tried and failed to sign first Nick Johnson and then Adam Laroche. Even compared to those guys, Huff seemed like a pretty poor solution. Well, let's take a look at what both Laroche and Johnson are doing this season.

Laroche: He spurned a two-year offer from the Giants to go rot in the desert heat, and he's having a decent year so far, with nine homers and a 109 OPS+. Not bad, but he's no Aubrey. Hey, Adam, how's the view from all the way down there in last place? Yeah, that's what you get for turning your nose at us, ya bum.

Johnson: He also turned down a more lucrative offer from San Francisco to go play around in New York for a year. After a month of drawing walks and doing nothing else, he's back in his natural habitat, the disabled list. His injury isn't supposed to be a major setback, but knowing this guy, he's probably done until 2012. Consider him a bullet dodged (as I whistle my way past the final comment here).

So sometimes you just never know. It's looking more and more like Huff's 2009 was the outlier and that the Giants got the deal of the decade. Fears that he'll regress run high, but taking into account his ability to work counts, hit lefties, and hit to the opposite field, I'd be bloody shocked if he doesn't continue to mash for the rest of the year (if not quite at his current pace). We all love beating Sabean like a Brit on St. Paddy's Day, but Huff ranks as one of his best moves in a while.

With Huff, Andres Torres, Juan Uribe, Santiago Casilla, and Guillermo Mota all coming up gold, these low budget pickups threaten to restore some of our faith in our fearless leader, God forbid. Let's just hope he doesn't become obsessed with the World Cup, like some others we know.

Let's Just Say We Were Beaten By the Best

2010-06-15T22:36:00.000-07:00

After watching last night's game, I made a snarky comment to myself about how atrocious the Orioles are this year. I mean, they're bad. This year's Oriole team channels the hopeless 1988 squad, who lost 107 games and had Billy Ripken as their second baseman, 20 years before he'd become a bald studio analyst for the MLB Network. The 2010 squad provides a similar mix of inept hitting and bad pitching that can only be tolerated with lots of liquor and small amounts of self-hatred. It's the kind of team that makes you really feel for a fanbase. Hey, Oriole fans, if it's any consolation to you, at least most of you don't live in South Carolina.

Of course, naturally, after I ripped on them like a frat boy on an AV dweeb, tonight the Orioles beat the Giants, 4-1, behind Jake Arrieta, a fresh-faced rook with all of one major league start under his belt. To be fair, Arrieta is a decent prospect with some pretty good minor league numbers, but...yuck. This is a series you expect the Giants to sweep. Yes, take nothing for granted, blah blah blah, but subconsciously we all figured the Giants would roll through these three games before heading off to Toronto. Now they go into a rubber match against Jeremy Guthrie, Baltimore's most consistent pitcher, and a soft-tosser who you just know is going to give the Giants fits. I'm scared.

A few random notes...

-If Denny Bautista didn't walk every other batter, he could be something along the lines of Felix Rodriguez circa 2000-01. His stuff is just filthy. I'd read the old scouting reports, but I never imagined how great his fastball was until I actually watched players get blown away by it time and again. Every Bautista appearance is an exercise in chain-smoking due to his wildness, but if he ever gains even a modicum of control, he'd be a major asset. Of course, six other franchises already lost their patience waiting for that talent to manifest, so ration out the optimism in tiny doses.

-I'd like to take the time to gush about Andres Torres. He's the leadoff hitter the Giants have been waiting for essentially since Kenny Lofton appeared for two months in 2002. He's got the speed, the plate patience, the alley power, and the great defense. He's effectively enabled the Giants to kick Aaron Rowand to the curb. He showed this kind of talent last season by slugging .533 as a backup, but no one believed he could hold his own as a regular, given his uninspiring minor league track record.

Oops. As it stands now, Torres is literally one of the best players in the league. What are the chances that Torres sustains this incredible hitting display? Let's not speak of such things. Let's just hope and pray to whatever god (or lizard person) you believe in that he's the once-in-a-blue moon player who just suddenly gets it in the second half of his career and starts playing like an All-Star. Maybe something like this guy.

-Baseball Reference, aka the most awesome website in the history of the world, has now features old mug shots on each player's page, which is bad news if you decide to check out how Don Mossi's career went. This, of course, leads me to this absolutely hilarious article by Josh Wilker of Cardboard Gods, on an old baseball card of Mossi's.

The Pros and Cons of Pat the Bat

2010-06-09T22:10:00.000-07:00

See what happens when you drop a couple of competent hitters into the lineup? Good things tend to occur. More runs are scored, there's less of a burden on the pitchers, and I don't have to grind my teeth to a nub after the umpteenth double play ball. Okay, so I still have to do that, but at least it seems like it's not happening as often. Ever since Andres Torres and Buster Posey were inserted into the batting order as regular it just seems like the Giants have been scoring more. I'm too lazy to check the numbers to see if that's true, but I'll take a placebo over watching Bengie Molina bat any day.

Of course, the sane thing to do, if the Giants want to keep winning, would be to bench Aaron Rowand once and for all and jettison Molina now. This crazy dream that Rowand will get going again only lives on in the minds of baseball salts who aren't aware that mediocre 30-somethings with zero plate awareness rarely just "get it back". Molina's early season walk binge was fun and all, but those walks have now dried up, and he isn't even hitting for power now, which means he's just a horrible player. Maybe, you say, he'll straighten things out given some more time. Ahem, I refer you back to the Rowand example.

Rowand is making big money and Molina has some Randall Flagg-type magic spell placed on Giants management, so neither are going anywhere. That's a bummer for us, and Nate Schierholtz, who now looks to be in serious peril of falling into the dustbin of forgotten and misused players, along with Fred Lewis and Kevin Frandsen. At least the Giants aren't being complete idiots in their willingness to keep Posey in the majors for good; they're just being idiots by making him play out of position, thus also necessitating Aubrey Huff's move to the outfield, which promises all kinds of fun...if your idea of fun is a defensive nightmare. Which brings me to...

Pat Burrell. In desperate need of a power bat, the Giants added Burrell to the already hopelessly muddled outfield mix. Burrell has been decent enough in a few starts so far, but I'm confused as to what happens when (or if, I suppose) Mark Derosa comes back. What good is a super-utility guy when he has no place to play? You can't bench Juan Uribe and Freddy Sanchez right now. If Burrell hits like he's consuming Philly cheese steaks again, you won't want to bench him. This is quite the conundrum.

Anyway, about Burrell. What he brings to the table, obviously, is a big stick and an ability to take walks. Well, that would be the case if it were 2008. Once the Phillies recorded the last out of the '08 World Series, Burrell morphed into a big blob of suck, and his bat hasn't been seen since. Perhaps a return to the National League will help cure what ails his weak stick (yes, I know there's a Viagra joke there...lay off). Maybe, but Burrell has those much-dreaded "old player skills", which means he's likely fallen off of a cliff that can't be re-scaled.

Burrell's fielding at this point is an embarrassment about on par with Ronny Cedeno's eyeblack mustache (that was a fail if I've ever seen one). In fact, the Rays thought they were getting the deal of a lifetime by signing Burrell as a DH so they wouldn't have to witness him clomping around cluelessly in the outfield. Well, the joke is on them; they didn't have to watch him field and he still turned into an albatross.

So Burrell is a defensive liability and his bat may never wake up (and he's also possibly a bit of a creep). Hey, he's 33, so he fits right in with the organizational philosophy! The reward here is reasonably high if Burrell can regain some of his former mojo. The risk is low because he can be dumped like a bottle of Mezcal if he stinks it up. I just can't help wondering if this isn't a huge redundancy when Schierholtz could provide 3/4 of the bat and twice the defense, rendering this whole Pat the Bat experiment redundant.

Buster'd Stuff

2010-05-31T22:53:00.000-07:00

Here's the scenario. Take the generally anemic Giant offense and pit them against a pitcher with ten wins and an ERA you'd need the Hubble Space Telescope to find, and see what shakes loose. Yeah, that was bound to go well. Couple that with the fact that the team's 5'10'' superstud still can't find the strike zone, and it was probably a foregone conclusion that today's Memorial Day game was going to be a stinker.

This afternoon's loss can't take away from the success of the weekend, though, as the Giants swept the DBacks, concluding the broomsmanship with an exciting comeback win on Sunday. Right in the middle of the carnage, of course, was uberprospect Buster Posey, who made his 2010 debut and rapped out six hits over the weekend. Yes, I'm very happy to admit that I delayed some of my weekend plans just to see his first two at-bats.

So Posey enlivened our hearts and did a beautiful job of making the Giants front office look like a bunch of asses. A better debut I can't immediately think of (all right, you got me). Posey's immediate success means the Giants can't stick him on the bench any time soon; Mays Field would be burned to the ground. The major question is: where does Posey fit once Edgar Renteria and Mark Derosa come back?

The Giants still have a massive Bengie-crush, even as he falls back to sub-.300 OBP Earth, so he's probably not going to be traded. You can't bench Aubrey Huff or Juan Uribe at this point (am I late in realizing how sad it is that these guys are the Giants best hitters?). If Renteria continues to hit anything like he has been once he comes off the DL, he has to play. Derosa is another power source and there's no way he's going to be this bad once he returns. Andres Torres can't be benched because he's ten kinds of awesome and I'll bomb Brian Sabean's office with C4-loaded carrier pigeons if anything happens to him. Nate Schierholtz provides defensive brilliance and a competent enough bat.

I guess what I'm saying here is that the elephant in the room is Aaron Rowand. In case of roster crunch, bench Rowand. After his obligatory hot two weeks, he's now basically a second pitcher in the lineup and needs to go. However, money talks and bullshit...well, doesn't walk and puts up a .263 OBP, but you get it. Rowand's contract prevents him from being shipped off anywhere, so we're stuck watching him swing at sliders five feet off the plate for the foreseeable future.

The who is going to get screwed here is most likely Schierholtz. Huff looks competent in left field now, but I'm going to take a wild guess and say that given a larger sample size he'll be a liability. Once again, though, his bat has to be in the lineup, so the Giants are probably forced to just plug their nose and hope he doesn't sink to Glenallen Hill levels. When Derosa comes back...ah who the hell knows? Every infielder is hitting better than he is, so he'll probably just turn into a supersub who spells one player each night. Whatever the case, any solution that gives us more Buster Posey, sign me up for.

That Boy Ain't Right

2010-05-26T23:32:00.000-07:00

On the heels of their depressing five-game losing streak, the Giants at least succeeded in passing the Livan Test, beating everyone's favorite gelatinous mass last night and (supposedly) reigniting the offense with a little home cookin'. If your bats can't get going against El Tubbo and his assortment of 40 mph breaking balls, then it's time to seriously consider some major reconstructive roster surgery, and I don't mean a just a "shuffling of the dreck chairs" (God, I love that headline).

Tonight, though, the bats went quiet against Luis Atilano, a guy whom no one has ever heard of but who came into the game with more walks than strikeouts (and he has that same 15:19 ratio after the game, since he neither walked nor struck anyone out) and a very unintimidating minor league record. He's the very epitome of a guy bad teams throw out to the mound as cannon fodder, praying their lineup has seven runs in them that night. So he should have been easy pickings for a reinvigorated Giants lineup, right?

Nah. The Giants swung early and often at Atilano's assorted crap and hit grounder after grounder, and Atilano came out looking like a modern day, Hispanic Randy Jones. The Nationals, on the other hand, worked Tim Lincecum like a dog, and Timmy threw 96 pitches, couldn't get past the fifth inning, and just generally looked lost all game. Kruk and Kuip noted that in the early going Lincecum kept glancing skyward, wondering where his lost command had run to. Trust me, guys, heavenward is where we'll be gazing a lot if Timmy can't get this stuff sorted out soon.

It's Lincecum's third straight wild start, more concerning this time because it came at home. He doesn't necessarily look fatigued, just out of whack. A lot of fastballs are sailing high and up out of the strike zone, which tends to indicate a mechanical problem. Or perhaps his, um, extracirricular activities are following him onto the field. I wonder if the Giants will have Lincecum skip a start or take an extra day of rest due to the recent struggles.

Speaking of pitchers who haven't looked good lately, Barry Zito goes tomorrow to try to give the Giants the series win. Zito's line looked poor against Oakland, but he basically got dinked and doinked to death, and few balls were hit very hard. My favorite fun fact about Zito thus far this season is that he's only allowed one homer so far in over 60 innings. Anyone want to bet that that rate won't hold over the course of the season?

That Was Ugly

2010-05-24T22:00:00.000-07:00

In the last two Giants-A's Interleague games I've attended, the Giants have scored exactly zero runs. The last such game I had gone to see between these two teams ended with something known as Lenny DiNardo shutting down the Giants completely. Yesterday, with me sitting there once again in all my sunburned, alcohol-fueled glory, the Giants were shut down by Ben Sheets and his three merry men. Right about now, I'm halfway convinced that the next time I go to one of these Bay Bridge games, the A's could trot out a 65-year-old Ken Holtzman and he'd throw a one-hit shutout.

Yesterday was just embarrassing. I mean, the whole weekend series was like a bad joke, but yesterday's game was especially miserable because I had to sit there in my mock Zito jersey (my Lincecum jersey was in the wash) and take in the insults from the surrounding wasted A's fans like a jackass. A 500-pound A's fan danced and yelled trash talk as he nearly brought down the bleachers under his girth, and some jerk tried to mockingly high five me on the way out of the stadium. If I had been drinking during the game, he'd have gotten a foot in the nards. I've cooled in my views toward the A's over the years since my utter hatred of them as a kid, but games like this threaten to break the increasingly tenuous cease-fire.

Honestly, I could handle most of the crap from the game yesterday. I could handle the drunken A's fans and their none-too-witty jabs, safe in the knowledge that the only way they get 20,000 people to their crappy ballpark is when the Giants roll in. I could also handle the raging sunburn and the awful Coliseum hot dogs, and nearly being crapped on by seagulls after the game as we waited for (likely) over 0.08 BAC drivers to filter out of the parking lot.

What I couldn't handle was the pathetic way the Giant hitters just went down like flies throughout the entire weekend. They didn't work counts, they didn't hit the ball hard, and they didn't seem like they had a clue, ever. Aubrey Huff and Andres Torres are the only players on the Giants right now who are putting up decent at-bats. Pablo Sandoval has had a horrid month, but at least he looks like he's maybe sorta coming out of it. Aaron Rowand and Freddy Sanchez look absolutely horrible, and Juan Uribe and Bengie Molina seem to be slipping back toward the dreaded mean. Being an eyewitness to this stuff was pure torture.

On the bright side of things, it's now almost two whole months into the season, and Jonathan Sanchez has an ERA of exactly 3.00. The grueling starts that turn into walk-a-thons and pitch count nightmares are becoming fewer are fewer, and his BB/9 rate is down considerably. The evidence continues to grow that the mechanical adjustments he made half way through last season are truly paying off. Despite all this, he still has a Matt Cain-esque 2-4 record, leading to conspiracy theories that the Giants feel they have to put every starting pitcher through a hellish season with zero run support as a sort of inane rite of passage.

No Sheltering Sky

2010-05-20T22:16:00.000-07:00

The thing about having high hopes for the Giants this season is that losses like tonight's 8-7 grumble-a-thon sting a lot more. If the Giants suck and they lose a game like this, I can just turn the TV off and get on with my life. If they are in contention, losses like this have me waking up screaming in the middle of the night, babbling about Dan Runzler's latest fastball to the backstop.

Ah, Runzler. I'm becoming less and less of a fan with each passing game. Yeah, his stuff is nasty, but I've gotta say I'm pretty tired of watching him come in and immediately walk two guys to put himself in trouble, then leave the game so some other poor bullpen sap can wobble his way out of the mess. When Bochy left Runzler in to start the seventh instead of bringing in Jeremy Affeldt, I'm sure everybody could have predicted it'd be bad times.

Couple the bullpen meltdown with the fact that the ninth inning degenerated into one big bitchfest between home plate umpire Mark Wegner and the Giants bench, and this was a pretty brutal game to endure. As opposed to laundry list of nightmare games in Coors Field, the Giants have historically had better luck winning slugfests in the Chase Field bandbox, so I had a better feeling about pulling this one out. Nope. Between this game and the sight of Todd Wellemeyer and Brandon Medders giving the first game away, it was a bad short series under the desert sky. Yes, we need new dreams tonight.

Glossing over the late-game gag reel that sent the Giants to their undoing, I think we should ask why Tim Lincecum has suddenly lost his control. He's now walked ten batters in his last two games, and tonight he hit the 100 pitch mark in just the fifth inning. It's one thing to work carefully to a good Dbacks lineup in a hellish ballpark to pitch in. It's another to walk five Astros when the team is sporting a collective .277 OBP (I wish I were kidding).

Is Timmy fatigued? Don't say that word around the pitch count nazis. They'll cut you a good one. I'm thinking it's just a case of midseason small sample fooferah. Every pitcher has a stretch where they aren't sharp. Remember when we were ready to sing songs of the looming Apocalypse after Lincecum's first two starts last year?

Another Day, Another Workmanlike Loss To the Padres

2010-05-17T22:04:00.000-07:00

This is getting ridiculous. If it weren't for the blasted Padres, the Giants would be the best team in the National League. The Dodgers are hated, the Rockies are annoying, but the Padres are just becoming a sort of Boogeyman, a constant antagonist like this scary bastard. I've never disliked the Pads, and they're seen as a sort of grudging ally in the NL West, but give me a break. The pathetic thing is, other than Adrian Gonzalez, there doesn't seem to be a guy in their lineup who should beat you. And yet they do...every single time.

Tonight's game encapsulated, once again, everything that is frustrating about being an opponent in Petco Park, and why the Giants seemingly haven't won there since 2006. Hard hit smash that looks destined to be ten rows deep in the bleachers? Watch it nestle into Kyle Blanks's glove ten feet short of the warning track. The Giants get a runner on second base finally? Watch him stand there deserted as three straight batters pop out to end the threat. Two drunk morons run out onto the field during the ninth inning as Heath Bell's arm starts to ice? Don't worry. Eugenio Velez is here to whiff feebly and ensure that no damage will come of it.

When I learned today that the series in San Diego was just a two-gamer, it was the best news I'd heard all day (sorry, BP). If the Giants somehow beat Cy Latos tomorrow to split the series it'll be more impressive than Dallas Braden's perfect game, because it's just that unlikely. Frankly, at this point, I don't care. Just get tomorrow's game over with and, to paraphrase Douglas Quaid, get your ass to Arizona.

--Good thing the Giants scrapped worthless old Fred Lewis. What's that lousy good-for-nothing doing these days? Oh, right. Lewis isn't setting the world on fire with Toronto, exactly, but his .796 OPS wouldn't look too bad in the Giants' outfield right now, especially now that Mark Derosa might be gone for a long time. Remember that every time you have to endure another hopeless Velez at bat.

The Five Stages of Petco Park Death

2010-04-22T21:27:00.000-07:00

1) Dread. The Giants are heading into Petco Park for a weekend set? Buy a box of hankies. No matter how bad the Padres suck, the Giants always roll into Petco Park and get manhandled like Jim Cramer on The Daily Show. Along with Coors Field, this is the most dreaded place in the NL West, but instead of 5-hour, 16-15 marathons that mock everything that baseball is, you're treated to 1-0 losses with 430-foot bombs that land safely into the right fielder's glove.

2) Hope. Well, maybe this year will be different. The Giants are playing good baseball, they're off to a hot start, and their offense has been rolling on all cylinders. I mean, a ballpark can't have ownage on a team forever, right? Right?

3) Rage. It's the sixth inning. Kevin Correia has given up one hit and has thrown 50 pitches. The Padres have mustered just two singles and yet have somehow scored four runs. As Bengie Molina hits a first-pitch chopper to the deep shortstop hole and gets thrown out by 50 feet, you feel that blood vessel in your temple getting dangerously close to exploding. The Giants get two runners on but some unknown sidearmer strikes Mark Derosa out on three straight sliders off the plate to end the threat. The urge to wage war on the neighborhood with a board and rusty nail continues to rise.

4) Depression. The game rattles on into the late innings. The bottom of the order is up against the Padre closer, but you don't care. You sank into the loving grasp of your tenth bottle of Newcastle long ago and now Heath Bell looks like some strange, amorphous blob hucking foreign objects at stick men. What's this? In the midst of the drunken stupor, you realize that Juan Uribe has just tied the game with a home run. It doesn't matter. The Giants are doomed. Time for number eleven...

5) Devastation. Scott Hairston has just ended the game with a long, extra inning home run. Again.

I missed all of Tuesday's 1-0 loss because I was out with friends. I was spared most of Wednesday's loss because I was at work. For these reasons, and these reasons only, I am still sane enough to type stuff on a keyboard semi-coherently.

Tim Lincecum's long hair is Jesus-length at this point. Maybe he can act as the savior from the brutal four-game losing streak the Giants just suffered through. If he descends from the sky bathed in white light and flanked by seraphs at each side, so much the better.

--There's a Hole In My Heart, As Deep As a Wellemeyer...

All right, let's just get this out of the way. Todd Wellemeyer sucks. Every Giants fan in the world was willing to put their better judgement aside in hopes that Wellemeyer would grab the fifth starter job by the barrel and reign fiery hell upon with NL hitters. As Rod Stewart's "Reason To Believe" was played repeatedly on iPods in Giants fans' living rooms everywhere, Wellemeyer's pitching history was subsequently ignored and his poor stuff was glossed over.

Well, after three starts of batting practice, Wellemeyer is in full blown Tomko territory. The guy was marketed as a control pitcher, but he's walked 11 batters in 14 innings. He's got nothing on his pitches. Watching him throw is like watching Ryan Sadowski's grizzled older brother. The Giants really expect this guy to stop the Phillies this weekend? Give me a break.

--As you well know, Pablo Sandoval is just one awesome dude. This, however, raises his coolness level to epic heights. How did Giants fans luck out so much to be graced with this guy and Tim Lincecum at virtually the same time?

Hell Comes to Munchkinland

2010-04-19T22:35:00.000-07:00

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Petco Park! The faster the Giants get out of this hellhole, the better. Even with the Padres up only 2-1 late, it seemed more like a 10-run lead. Even though Clayton Richard came into the game with a career 4.77 ERA, we knew he'd pitch like Sandy Koufax. Even when Juan Uribe momentarily brightened our spirits with a game-tying home run, it seemed he was just delaying the inevitable. Sure enough, the Giants ended up getting beaten on a foul pole bomb by a refugee from the local Everquest convention.

The Good: Matt Cain overcame some early shakiness to pitch six strong innings. My opinion on Juan Uribe has done a complete 180 in the past year, going from baffled hatred to borderline man-crush territory. Please don't let the dream die, Juan.

The Bad: Jeremy Affeldt doesn't look sharp at all. Eugenio Velez is...stop me if you've heard this before...still awful. Eckstein, Eckstein, Eckstein.

Also, if anyone still wants to claim that replay on home runs is a bad thing, I direct you to Clayton Richard's long double in tonight's game. It was a long drive that clearly short-hopped the wall, but was initially, and inexplicably, called a home run. It was a home run only in the sense that Avatar was a deep, original story. The call was immediately overturned, but it came perilously close to being the worst blown call in the history of blown calls.

Let's see...two emotionally draining losses in a row? And two more at Petco Park? Excuse me while I go cry into my pillow.

Shot to the Heart, and Manny's to Blame

2010-04-18T22:25:00.000-07:00

Losses like this afternoon's 2-1 fall to the Dodgers suck especially hard. Not just because the team was beat by an obnoxious, dreadlocked jackass, but because just one inning before, the Giants had the bases loaded with designs on extending the lead to where no man, female hormone-addled flake or no, could do no harm. They failed to capitalize, of course, and that led to Manny shoving his fist into our collective chests and ripping out our hearts like a scenery-chewing madman fighting Indiana Jones. Devastating, game-winning home runs hurt more when you shouldn't have even been in a position for the homer to matter.

Despite it, I'm not as depressed as I should be. Let me count the reasons.

1) It's still early in the season. Yay. Imagine if that home run happened in a late-September series or, gasp, if it decided a pennant race. I'd be dangling off a skyscraper right now.

2)Sergio Romo coughed it up, and he's been awesome lately, so he gets a mulligan. I mean, how can you be mad at Romo? He's so friggin' cool. He's like Lester Freamon cool.

3) The Giants are still plating runs. Even down 7-0 early on Friday, they clawed their way back to make the Dodgers sweat it a little. The Giants we know and love from the past few seasons would have just rolled over and died. This newfound ability to cross that strangely-shaped object they call "home plate" may not last, but I'll take whatever encouragement I can get.

4) The evidence continues to pile up that this new, competent Barry Zito is the one that is going to stay around. If this keeps up, when reminded by Dodger fans about Zito awful contract, we can simply retort, "Yeah, well, he's not the worst pitcher in the world. And he's no Darren Dreifort." This time two years ago you couldn't say that at all.

The oncoming series in San Diego against the Padres has me worried. Not because the Padres are good; no, take solace in knowing that they're still comically terrible. I'm worried because all kinds of bad crap goes down when the Giants visit Petco. They don't hit, they blow leads, and Scott Hairston turns into Babe Ruth. Last year they didn't win a single game in Petco until the last series of the season. Petco is a Giant-killing dead zone, a place where they lose in very bad and wacky ways. It's kind of like Coors Field, only with its balls cut off.

Prepping For the Big Boys

2010-04-14T22:26:00.000-07:00

I've often pondered exactly what would be the most demeaning way to give up a home run in a baseball game. Giving up a home run to a relief pitcher would figure to be the worst, or maybe serving up a tater to an opposing starter in a key game down the stretch. What about giving one up to Rafael Belliard? I'm sure Steve Stone has something to say about surrendering embarrassing home runs.

After watching Eli Whiteside belt a decisive home run in today's game to propel the Giants to victory, I have to imagine that having the backup catcher smoke laser beam home runs off of you has to be pretty high on that list.

Backup catchers are, of course, just a notch above pitchers on the can't-hit scale. They're only in there because they can catch and throw and because the regular catcher can't do a day-after-night game. Their job is to play defense, call a good game, and stay out of the way. They're the guys that are hidden at the bottom of the lineup, with managers praying that they don't come up in a crucial situation. So today when Charlie Morton gave up a clout to Eli Whiteside, who has basically been an automatic out in his career, I could see him there on the mound probably wishing that were Pablo Sandoval at the plate, everything else being the same.

The Giants are 7-2, the offense looks (shockingly) good, and the talk show callers are adamant in their projections of an historic 117-win season. The team's early success, though, has been in part due to a pretty weak schedule. The Astros still haven't won a game and the Pirates are still unsuccessfully attempting their makeover after being the laughingstock of the '00s. Barry Zito and Matt Cain clearly weren't on their game in the first two Pittsburgh games. I wonder, against a real lineup, would their stat line have survived to come out respectable?

The Giants get their first true test this weekend, facing The Evil Ones in their volcanic pit. All hope abandon? Screw that noise. If there's one thing that gets us Giants fans revved up, it's the first series against the Dodgers, a means of setting the tone for the season. Or watching Orlando Hudson single-handedly embarrass us like last season. You know, whatever.

-Cheers to Aubrey Huff's awesome inside-the-park home run today that played out like it was happening in slow motion. Huff ran the bases like he was dragging a piano behind him, but he still managed to slide into home without a throw. Early returns on Huff are mixed. He's not great, but he's relatively patient and he'd have three homers by now if it weren't for that damned triple's alley.

-Jeers to the Giants' public relations staff and broadcasting crew for letting the Bengie Molina lovefest go so far that they completely ignored two of the greatest Giants catchers in their history. In their haste to anoint Molina as the franchise's RBI king at catcher, the team apparently forgot that Dick Dietz and Tom Haller were alive at one point and damn fine players as well. Molina isn't the all-time RBI leader for a Giants catcher; he's not even close. When called on the flub, Mike Krukow issued an on-air apologia. Embarrassing, to be sure, but Kruk and Kuip are so cool, who are we to truly complain?

Fast Start

2010-04-07T22:35:00.000-07:00

The Houston Astros remind me of the 2005-2007-era Giants. They're a franchise that has delusions of contention when it's clear to anyone with half of a working frontal lobe that they should be rebuilding. They have a couple of stars, but are hamstrung by a horrid farm system and their GM's bizarre middle reliever fetish. They have stocked their team with veteran retread free agents over the past couple of years in a vain attempt to win the NL Central, all the while spiraling down the path toward the inevitable nuclear option. Sounds all too familiar, right?

It comes as no surprise that the Giants won the opening series against Houston. They are the better team right, flaws and all? What was surprising that the Giants totally beat their brains out. I mean, forget the pitching. We pretty much expected Tim Lincecum, Barry Zito, and Matt Cain to carve up the crummy Houston lineup like an undead fiend in a shitty horror franchise reboot.

What was shocking was how effortlessly the offense racked up runs. The team was patient, they bunched hits together, they hit for power. It was sheer beauty, and it's not as if they were beating up on a bunch of low-end rotation nobodies; the only subpar starter they faced was wife-beating drunk Brett Myers. Suddenly, out of nowhere, there's a glimmer of hope that the Giants' offensive attack won't just consist of Pablo Sandoval trying to out-wacky the nine guys on the other side of the diamond. Maybe Hensley Meulens is a genius. Or maybe the Astros just stink.

-The shocker of the preseason was John Bowker, who rode a piping hot spring into a gig as the Giants' starting right fielder. Bowker gets minus points for being a Rio Americano alum (assholes had to use my high school's football field because they didn't have their own), but he has legitimate power, something the Giants desperately need. He still has a gigantic weakness for breaking balls in the dirt, and his defense was last described as undescribably bad, so skepticism is rampant, but I'm going to be an optimist and hope his success can be sustained.

Bonus Bowker points for this nugget of a story. I was watching a Giants game at the bar at a restaurant near my house last season when I mentioned something in passing about Bowker's local Sacramento roots. One of the bar waitresses overheard me and told me that her sister had dated Bowker in high school. This isn't particularly interesting, but suffice it to say, if the sister is anything as hot as this waitress was...more power to you, Bowk.

-Edgar Renteria had a game for the ages yesterday, going 5-5 with a walk. All spring we heard about how his elbow is feeling so much better after he had bone chips removed and now he can pull a baseball again. His swing does look much better, thank goodness, and Renteria is now the favorite in the race for the "Barry Zito Please God Can We Salvage Some Value From This Awful Contract" Award.

-I literally wasted my entire month of February hooked on the HBO show The Wire (and I'm preparing myself to be similarly obsessed with David Simon's new series, Treme), so it pleases me to no end to see this thread devolve into a discussion of that series, after Jeff Passan uses a terrible analogy equating Bodie Broadus's inner turmoil to that of a small market franchise in baseball. (If you haven't seen the whole series, though, don't read. Major spoilers.)

The Sad, Doomed Story of Fred Lewis

2010-03-15T21:57:00.000-07:00

In an exhibition game this afternoon against Texas, Fred Lewis yanked a Rich Harden fastball down the line and over the fence to give the Giants an early lead. It was an exciting moment, a laser beam home run off of a nasty pitcher. To our friend Freddy, all I can say is, enjoy it while it lasts, bud.

Ah, Freddy, the former Mother's Day assassin and one of the few bright spots of the 2008 season, once one of my favorite Giants, who now seems destined to be flung into the garbage bin of Giants history. Say hello to Dax Jones for me. It's unfortunate, but not altogether unsurprising, as Lewis's fate has seemingly been set in stone since mid-summer of last year.

Lewis's skill set contains essentially every blind spot the Giants' front office has for evaluating ballplayers. He strikes out a lot, but also gets on base a lot; only one of these things actually matters. He takes horrible routes to fly balls on occasion, but every defensive metric I've seen rates him as a good outfielder with a lot of range (with some even rating him as outstanding). But when you fall down chasing a fly ball once a month, this Giants brass views your next role as standing in the outfield watching Walter Matthau pass out drunk on the pitcher's mound.

If Lewis is indeed cut loose this Spring, it just marks the final chapter of the Giants basically pissing on the career of a talented player. He's no star, but he was better than Dave Roberts, better than Aaron Rowand, and better than, need I even say it, Eugenio Velez. Except whenever it was time for Lewis to get his chance, after grinding through several years as an organizational soldier, the Giants felt that since he had never broken his nose chasing a long fly ball into a fence, then dammit, they'd go out and overpay someone who did.

By the time Lewis finally got a shot as a regular, he was in his late-20's, and still the Giants were seemingly looking for every reason to chop his playing time. A few called third strikes here, and an outfield dirtburger or two there, and sure enough, Lewis was riding the pine. I'm sure Lewis will latch on with some team and serve a few more years as a solid role player or platoon outfielder, with probably more than a few Ricky Ledee-esque, Giant-killing moments in his bat. Remember that when we're sitting in front of the TV wondering why we're still being bombared with daily doses of Eugenio.

--In today's WTF article, courtesy of Andrew Baggarly, comes a story about our pudgy pal Bengie Molina, and how he used to be a shortstop. Wait...what? Yeah, I can't believe it either, but check it out. It's Ripley's-level weirdness.

--More Irish fun as we gear up for St. Patrick's Day.

Spring Cleaning

2010-03-14T21:35:00.000-07:00

Some quick notes as I recover from a (mostly) Wire-induced haze to focus on baseball again. I will say that nothing baseball-related in the past two months has been anywhere near as entertaining as the goofy Eric Massa-Glenn Beck interview last week.

--Funny how all it takes is one obese asshole to ruin a franchise I have always liked since childhood. Last week, after Barry Zito drilled the Brewers' Prince Fielder in apparent retaliation for his childish end-game theatrics after a walk-off home run last season, Fielder boasted that he would happily do the same thing all over again and that his antics were "worth it". Sigh, what would Harvey Kuenn think, Prince?

OK, the Giants should probably get over this (they surrendered the home run after all), but to celebrate a meaningless win on a crappy team in such an obnoxious way is classless, to say the least. That Fielder is so resolute in his insistence that he was in the right just makes him seem like a total jerk. I was hoping, just hoping, that some member of the Giants would have the balls to say that they weren't worried about Fielder charging the mound that game because a forklift would be required to get him out there.

--My favorite impending fiasco so far this Spring is the Freddy Sanchez situation. Signed to a two-year deal despite a recent history of injuries (recent, as in, he missed nearly a month after the Giants traded for him), the Giants tried to keep his shoulder surgery hush-hush (allegedly to have some leverage in re-signing Juan Uribe), and now he's behind schedule and will probably start the season on the DL. Translation: don't be surprised if we don't see him until late-June. Keep in mind that he's really not all that good in the first place and we have the makings of Edgar Renteria Part Deux.

Of course, the Giants had to re-sign Sanchez after trading prospect Tim Alderson to get him, in part to justify such a questionable move. If Sanchez is, indeed, an injury-riddled wreck for the next two years (not out of the question), well...I'm reminded of the lessons of Fargo. Crazy how one bad decision can snowball into a complete mess. Let's hope there's no woodchipper involved in this one.

--Madison Bumgarner continues to scare the hell out of everybody with his reduced velocity, and now it appears as though he won't be breaking camp with the big club, leaving the team with no clear fifth starter. One popular candidate to fill that vacancy is non-roster invitee Todd Wellemeyer, a journeyman famous for having one decent, Dave Duncan-derived season in St. Louis. Wellemeyer was jettisoned by the Redbirds last year after his ERA wandered periliously close to the sixes. Excuse me for having Russ Ortiz circa 2007 flashbacks.

Perusing Christina Kahrl's rundown of still-available free agents, there isn't much to shout about, unless you consider Braden Looper's innings-eating suckiness to be the stuff that fifth starter dreams are made of. One move that might be plausible would be to bring in Kiefer Sutherland clone Jarrod Washburn, if the Giants could sign him to a one-year deal. Yes, I realize Washburn's tidy 2.64 ERA with Seattle in '09 was largely a Franklin Gutierrez-made anomaly. However, his sudden awfulness in Detroit had more than a little to do with a knee injury.

You get Washburn and his fly-ball tendencies, put him in a park with a big outfield, with good defenders out there (like the Giants have), and you've got a viable fifth starter, one who should run you up 170-180 league average innings. Can the Giants get him for one year, and a couple million? There are worse ways to spend that money (the Giants know alllll about that). Washburn already stupidly turned down a $5 million offer from Minnesota, and the market for him doesn't seem to be very bearish, so I'd say he's an option worth looking into.

--Not for nothing, here's the most hilariously ridiculous trade rumor so far this year.

--In the spirit of St. Patrick's Day, and in celebration of half of my lineage, I plan on posting an Irish-related video each day. Enjoy!

The Enigma That Is Denny Bautista

2010-01-26T06:00:00.000-08:00

Quick. I'll give you three guesses as to why Denny Bautista, an obscure pitcher just given a spring training invite by the Giants, is famous amongst statheads. Give up? It's because, a few years ago, Bautista was involved in a trade that sent the saber community into a complete uproar, while many others wondered just what the fuss was about.

Once upon a time, Bautista was a fairly hot prospect in the Orioles system, a guy who threw hard as hell, with lots of movement, but, as is the case with many of his ilk, no bloody idea where the ball was going. Still, that arm had a lot of analysts from both camps drooling. There seemed to be star potential hidden away, if only someone could tame the wild beast he called a right arm.

Of course, in a move typical of the brainlessness shown by the Baltimore front office in the past decade, the team traded Bautista for, wait for it...Jason Grimsley. Did the Orioles need relief help? Well, I guess, among many other things. Were they in a pennant race? Um, no. Did they give away a potentially useful arm to get an interchangeable reliever who'd later gain notoriety for ratting out several steroid users? Bingo!

Bautista has never for a second had any success in the major leagues (the trade was made in 2004), so the Orioles' idiocy hasn't really come back to bite them. Back then, though, I remember sabermetric fans, and a couple of Baseball Prospectus writers, being simply aghast that a legitimate power arm was acquired by the Royals for essentially nothing. It was a great trade for the Royals, albeit one that didn't work out in the end. Hell, it even had some writers fooled into thinking somebody smart was running the Kansas City show. Outside of that community, I don't think anybody really gave a damn. Denny who?

So I remember those days as Bautista shows up in Arizona in a Giants uniform, lugging with him a 6.26 career ERA and a 4.9 BB/9 rate. The chances that Bautista becomes a good pitcher are probably zero, as are the chances that we'll even hear anything about him after mid-March. I guess he serves as a lesson in the combustibility of pitching prospects, or as a testament to the righteousness of TINSTAPP. He's 29 and worth a flyer, but we stat geeks will always remember him for the one heist Allard Baird pulled off in the Royal front office (note: it didn't make up for Dye-for-Neifi).

Bengie, Bengie...Bengie Is Back

2010-01-25T06:00:00.000-08:00

The San Francisco Giants re-sign Bengie Molina to a one-year, $4.5 million deal. When I first read this headline, it was on my phone while on lunch break at work. I distinctly remember letting out a loud, "You've got to be fucking kidding me!" in the middle of line at the lunch stand, before continuing to stand there, jaw agape, refusing to believe what I was reading. I'm sure the people around me thought I was receiving news that a family member had died or something.

Well, here we are, and the seemingly unthinkable has happened. Molina is back, ensuring more first-pitch ground balls to the shortstop than we'll know what to do with. This of course means that Molina will be the Opening Day catcher, with Buster Posey heading to AAA. Get ready for more sub-.300 OBP fun and photo finish races to beat the center fielder's throw to first base on a single.

Ok, so I was absolutely aghast when I first caught wind of this, but with some time to think it over, this signing isn't really all bad. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that Posey really isn't ready. Well, that means that the Giants need a one-year stopgap to hold the fort while their catching phenom gets more seasoning in the minors. Who is that guy going to be?

It'd be nice to just be able reach out and grab a catcher who can draw walks, play good defense, and hit for a modicum of power, but sadly that's the farthest thing from reality. The alternatives to Molina look something like this: Signing Yorvit Torrealba to be a regular (no thanks), signing Rod Barajas, who is like a B-movie remake of Bengie (double no thanks), or making Eli Whiteside the starter (eeeek!). When you look at it that way, the Molina option doesn't seem half bad. For all of his faults, his power and still decent glove give him a leg up over the other guys' nothing.

Plus, Molina comes back to the Giants basically with hat in hand, having tested the free agent market and found out that no one sees him as a long-term regular. If Posey tears up Spring Training, tears up AAA, and forces himself into the starting role, Molina can't complain. Having re-signed he most likely understands his role as a placeholder at this point.

So as much as I never wanted to see Bengie back, this is an okay deal. Yeah, I realize that's going 100 mph in the opposite direction of my initial opinion on the signing, but really, it's not that bad. I still think that the Giants are going to screw this up somehow and ruin Posey's career while Molina returns for 2011 and beyond, but for now, I can deal with this.

War at Home

2010-01-18T22:22:00.001-08:00

Well, let's hope the looming arbitration battle between Tim Lincecum and the Giants doesn't get as ugly as the Late Night mudslinging affair between NBC and its two stars, Conan O'Brien and Jay Leno. What's the Lincecum equivalent of the "I'm With Coco!" movement? "I'm With Freak Boy?" "I'm With Pothead?" If things get heated, let's at least pray that someone trots out Vomiting Kermit to lighten the mood.

Of course, everybody in Giants-land (and all of baseball, for that matter) is waiting on pins and needles to see what kind of arbitration payday Lincecum stands to haul in. Even if it isn't the $20 million cash bonanza some are envisioning, it'll still be an unprecedented sum. As such, you can bet that the MLBPA and other GMs around the league are watching this very closely. By refusing to take a long-term contract from the team, Lincecum has brought himself to this point, standing to make a crapload of money on a year-to-year basis at the risk of losing money down the road in the case of a career-altering injury (yes, knock on wood).

For a nice rundown of what to possibly expect out of these proceedings, check out Jeff Euston's writeup for BP. According to the article, the largest raise ever given to a first-year arbitration-eligible was to Dontrelle Willis in 2005. Willis earned an increase in salary of over 1000 percent, to $4.35 million. An equivalent raise would get Lincecum to about $7.5 million, which is laughably low. In fact, I can't imagine the Giants even submitting a figure under $9 million, taking Lincecum's two Cys into account and all. Let's just hope Lincecum's post-arbitration career is more successful than Dontrelle's. Yuck.

I've touched on this before, but my amatuerish guess is that the two sides settle somewhere around $12 million. Even with the special provision regarding "special accomplishment" is very much in play, the fact that there's no precedent for any first-year arb player getting star free agent money is likely to work against Timmy.

-A beautiful tribute to a heroic man. Happy Martin Luther King Day, Giants fans!

Off In a Huff

2010-01-11T22:02:00.000-08:00

As I sit here and mull over the fact that, in their search for a left-handed power hitter, the best the Giants could muster was Aubrey mother-effing Huff, I start to ask myself: when was the last time the Giants signed a free agent that actually got me excited? Like, a free agent signing that made me legitimately happy and optimistic about the coming season? We all know about the recent lurid track record, and the 2006-07 winter of mayhem, but when was time the team made a really substantial, and good, free agent pickup? Well, this is where things get depressing.

As crazy as it is to say it, I think you have to go back pre-Sabean to find a free agent signing worth giving a hoot about. Yeah, all the way back to Barry Bonds. Most of Sabean's success came from trades and pilfering underrated players for the junk in his farm system, but his free agent track record has been mediocre-to-terrible, even in his 1997-2002 "genius" years. Perusing the list of signings during his tenure (not counting re-signings and extensions, a lot of which were terrible also), only Ray Durham looks like an out-and-out success, though I guess you can maybe count Omar Vizquel or Bengie Molina. Otherwise, there are a whole lot of Barry Zitos and Aaron Rowands in there.

Obviously, this latest move is hardly a blockbuster. Huff, is an iron glove who has had exactly one above-average year since 2004, and his big 2008 screams inexplicable, late-career fluke (think J.T. Snow's 2004). Huff has old player skills (no speed, poor glove, limited athleticism), which means a sudden decline into uselessness is a distinct possibility, if it hasn't started already. In fact, that probably explains why he stopped being an All-Star-caliber hitter after he turned 28. So, the Giants sign a mediocre, 30-something slugger whose best days were five years ago? Yeah, that sounds about right.

What doesn't make any sense about this at all is that the team felt the need to non-tender Ryan Garko to make this move. Garko is younger, better, probably cheaper, and retaining him would have saved the Giants the humiliation of knowing they traded Scott Barnes away for two craptastic months of small sample sized slumping. Instead they bring in a lesser player who is more likely to fade completely. Yep, makes perfect sense to me. It also means they've lost faith in Travis Ishikawa, who is probably relegated to the dustbin that is Fresno.

The signing is a one-year deal, and one-year deals never kill teams, so for all the eye-rolling this isn't something to start scraping knives over (and it's sure as hell better than bringing in Adam Laroche). It's just...uninspiring, and not well thought out. Then again, that's sort of the norm for the Giants these days when it comes to playing the free agent market.

Revisiting Resolutions

2010-01-04T21:36:00.001-08:00

In the first post of the new decade, I thought I'd revisit some New Year's resolutions I made last year, when I was writing for Bugs and Cranks. As 2009 dawned, I ticked off four things I vowed to do to make myself a better Giants fan, and a better baseball fan in general. How did I do? Let's find out.

1. Go to more games. Let's see, in 2008, I attended just one lousy game, and I pushed it as far as I could take it, since it was the very last game of the season. In 2009, I made it to three Giants games at Mays Field, so check this one off in the victory column. I attended the games on Memorial Day and Labor Day, both exhilarating wins, and also sat through one stinker, a late season drubbing at the hands of the Dodgers.

Since I live in Sacramento, making it to Giants games tends to be an expensive ordeal, which, coupled with a general lack of time and money, makes attending more than a handful of games each year unlikely. This year, though, I discovered the wonders of the Vallejo ferry, which takes you straight from the Vallejo docks to Mays Field, and right back after last pitch. For a man who has blown many a blood vessel screaming at the infuriating San Francisco traffic over the years, finally utilizing this was a total epiphany. Instead of having to deal with the traffic, the Bay Bridge, and the incompetent, overpriced fiasco known as stadium parking, we just drove the 45 minutes to Vallejo, paid for ferry tickets, and sat on our asses as the boat rolled across the bay. Pure money.

2. Stick out the tough games. There were some blowout games where I came home, sat on my couch, fell asleep, and woke up just as the games were ending, which sort of counts, I guess. For the first time in my life I finally got cable this year, which would theoretically make it easier to see every minute of every game, no matter how unwatchable. However, usually when the Giants were getting their butts handed to them, it was just so much more interesting to flip the channel and see the latest bad stock Jim Cramer was calling a can't-miss or check out whatever was making Glenn Beck cry on a given day. I probably didn't stick through as many hard losses as I should have, but I sat through every single minute of this one, dammit, so I'm calling this a break-even.

3. Listen to less sports talk radio. Done and done. I don't think I listened to a second of KNBR or any other sports talk show this season (much less the gawdawful KHTK 1140 that pollutes Sacramento), which is a minor miracle when you really think about it. I got my fill of mindless fan blather by reading the ESPN user comments, thank you very much. Seriously, I think I saved several thousand brain cells by going cold turkey from sports talk this year.

4. Update Stankeye more. This one I had trouble with, and continue to do so. Here's the problem. I get home from work dead tired, and want to do nothing but sit down, relax, and not think. After tending to stuff around the house, by the time I actually have a second to write anything, it's late and I'm torn between reading all the other great baseball stuff on the Internet, watching my Netflix, reading the stack of books on my reading list, or playing Guitar Hero. This problem is exacerbated when it's actually baseball season and the majority of weekday games don't end until like 10:00. Sometimes I have a legit excuse for not posting for like a week, other times it's just because I'm being a lazy bastard watching Firefly over and over again. I promise nothing, but I hope to ramp up the activity on this blog for the new decade, hopefully at one point writing a raving post following a Giants championship.

Here's for a great 2010, and a great Giant decade!

Ranking the Giants of the 2000s

2009-12-30T19:20:00.000-08:00

With the decade coming to a close (can you believe it's already been ten years since Mays Field opened? Scary), I thought I'd go through and rank each Giant team of the decade. The aughts were split into sort of two parts. The first half was the power years of the Bonds/Kent glory era, featuring a near-miss World Series appearance and a buttload of hitting. The second half was a more depressing slide into sub-mediocrity, as Brian Sabean tried his best to run the team into the ground in a sea of gawdawful veteran free agent signings.

Despite the losing in the latter half of the decade, I think we can all agree that it was a pretty fun ten years, featuring six winning seasons against four losers. That's nothing to complain about. Just ask any Pirates fan if they'd accept that level of success. With no more need for useless banter, let's start the ranking, from worst to first.

10. 2007 Giants (71-91)

Without a doubt the worst, most unwatchable team the Giants trotted out all decade, and probably the most uninspiring since the horrible 1996 squad. This team was the result of several years' worth of poor front office decisions and an offseason free agent spending spree that degenerated into a smoldering pile of WTF. Barry Bonds's home run record and Tim Lincecum's debut were the only reasons to watch, but even then, it was pretty hard to take. I think the point of the season where it became clear how bad it had gotten was at a game I attended where the team got shut out 1-0 by Lenny freaking DiNardo.

9. 2005 Giants (75-87)

What would the Giants ever do if Barry Bonds got hurt? Well, we found out the hard way when he missed almost all of the season, and Pedro Feliz had to take his place in left field. The answer was: lose a lot of ball games. Due to a horrible NL West, they inexplicably stayed in the race until the last week of the season, but they had no business sniffing the playoffs. Two miserable free agent signings (Armando Benitez and Mike Matheny), a bad year from Jason Schmidt, and several veterans falling off a cliff mixed together to provide one hell of a bad, boring team.

8. 2006 Giants (76-85)

They barely edge the '05 squad just because Bonds was around to provide a modicum of respectability, but they were still pretty terrible. A midseason winning streak led to an ill-advised trade for Shea "Why In Blue Hell Do People Think I'm Good?" Hillenbrand, and it was all downhill from there. Ray Durham's monster year and Schmidt's semi-return to form made things a little more watchable, though we had to sit through a full season of Matt Morris and Armando Benitez, which is no one's idea of a good time.

7. 2008 Giants (72-90)

It was a season that started off with a series of Bocockian question marks and ended with everybody on their feet at Mays Field, eagerly looking forward to the next season. Their record was worse than the '05 or '06 versions, but they rank higher because management was finally letting some young guys play and they ended the season on a high note, nicely foreshadowing the 2009 resurgence. Oh, and there was Tim Lincecum mowing batters down left and right, winning his first Cy Young and single-handedly making this team entertaining.

6. 2009 Giants (88-74)

It was a fun, inspiring season, but this squad was clearly the worst of the winning Giants teams, simply because they couldn't freaking hit. An insanely good pitching staff and defense led the team to a surprising run to 88 wins, albeit peppered with more than its fair share of emotionally devastating losses (dare I bring up that game in Colorado?). All I have to say about next year is: beware the Plexiglass Principle.

5. 2001 Giants (90-72)

You know your supporting cast sucks when you get historic performances from your left fielder and shortstop, and another All-Star-caliber year from your second baseman, and you still don't have enough offense to make the playoffs. This was probably the most underachieving Giants team I've ever seen. Black holes at center field, right field, catcher, third base, and first base, not to mention Livan Hernandez imploding in on himself, combined to sink a team that, talent-wise, really had no business missing October.

4. 2004 Giants (91-71)

A fun team that would just make you tear your hair out. The last Giants squad that could actually plate runs, they were an offensive machine with an ace pitcher and no bullpen to speak of. With even an average bully, this team would have blown by the Dodgers to win the NL West. Even with that carnage ensuing, the team still pushed the Dodgers into the last weekend of the season, before Wayne Franklin's last night on earth sank things for good.

This season is especially memorable for me since, in my need to vent after watching the Giants crap the season away, I was inspired to start this blog the following offseason. It was just a weird year, starting with the acquisition of A.J. Pierzynski, then one of my favorite players, and a guy who I was thrilled was going to be on the team (it obviously didn't end well). The Giants got off to a miserable start, but then hit a hot streak, touched off by a Jeff Weaver bitch-fest, and rolled into a classic rivalry race with LA. It was up and down until the devastating final weekend of the season. Oh, and we had to tolerate 319 Neifi Perez at-bats. Can't forget to mention that.

3. 2003 Giants (100-61)

A wire-to-wire, 100-win season, and it was just a crying shame that it ended with J.T. Snow sucking dirt as Pudge Rodriguez bellowed in triumph behind him. They weren't as good as their record indicated, which perhaps says something about Felipe Alou's managerial qualities, or maybe just dumb luck.

Looking at it now, this isn't a team that looks like they had any business winning 100 games. They had a superstar hitter in Bonds, and a supporting cast that could hardly be called world-beating. They had a stud ace pitcher in Schmidt, but the rest of the rotation was spotty and they had to bring in Sir Wide Load to bolster the staff for the playoffs. They essentially relied on a good bullpen, a terrific defense, two superstars, and some timely breaks (remember Jose Cruz's catch in this game?). Not a bad formula, but they were maybe the most vanilla 100-win team you'll ever see.

2. 2000 Giants (97-65)

Probably the most disappointing Giants team in memory. I mean, this team was good. They got off to a miserable start, but once the All-Star Break hit they started destroying everybody. Their pitching was solid, anchored by ace Livan Hernandez (yeah, you read that right), but it was the offense that carried them. Oh, that offense.

I seriously start to go gaga when I even start thinking about this team's ability to flat out hit the living shit out of the ball. I mean...look at this. Not only did they lead the league in OPS+, they absolutely lapped the field. No one could touch this offense. The lineup was a veritable Murderer's Row, filled with guys who bashed homers, took walks, and did just about everything you want in order to produce runs. With the paltry offense we have now, I look back at this with a nostalgic tear dripping down my cheek. God, look at Ellis Burks's batting line, then remember that he did this when Mays Field was playing like a pitcher's haven. That's insane.

Of course, once the playoffs hit, they forgot how to hit and Bobby Jones basically made them his bitch. Fans of other teams, you have no idea how embarrassing it is to type that. J.T. Snow's dramatic home run off of future Giant pariah Benitez made it look like the year was going to be magical, but instead it ended in a crumpled heap, much like Shawn Estes in Game Two. Just a friggin' tragedy.

1. 2002 Giants (95-66)

This team would garner the top spot simply because they came so close to the championship but, really, they were the best team in the NL that year. They were third in the league in ERA+ and first in OPS+ (it wasn't close), and they had a rock-solid defense, bolstered by some astute offseason moves by Sabean. Their Pythagorean record showed them to be a 98-win team (they won 95 in reality), and they had to fight in an extremely tough division. They proved their might by smoking through the Braves and Cardinals and then nearly beating a red-hot Angel team. All I have to say is...Damn you, Sandfrog!

All I Got For Christmas Were Two Redundant Utility Players

2009-12-27T22:10:00.001-08:00

I can't really tell if the Giants were naughty or nice this year because all Santa left was the signing of one solid, albeit 35-year-old, infielder and the rumor of the re-signing of a similarly skilled utility player. Today, the Giants signed super-utility man Mark Derosa to a two-year, $12 million deal, and there are rumors flying around that they're about to bring back Juan Uribe. Derosa can hit, he can play just about anywhere on the diamond, and he may make it so that we don't have to look at Edgar Renteria so much. Uribe, of course, turned down the Giants' original offer after having a solid year off the bench, but has now apparently had a change of heart.

Derosa is one of those guys who the Giants wouldn't have touched when he was struggling to prove himself as a younger player back in 2003 or so. It took a couple of years of decent production and enough veteran grizzle to get the Giants to even give him a second glance. I guess a nose-breaking defensive play and/or veteran neck beard is required before the Giants will extend you any kind of offer. Derosa's always been a good player, but he had a semi-inexplicable power spike two seasons ago, and his ability to pretty much fill in adequately at any position makes him an asset.

Yes, he's 35, and this won't stop the wags from taunting us by waving Depends wrappers any time soon, but he does improve the lineup, and if he craps out Renteria-style, no two-year contract can really hamstring a team. Plus, despite a poor showing in his time with St. Louis last year (likely brought on by a bum wrist), there isn't really any sign of a decline, not like the flashing red lights that should have kept the Giants away from Renteria a year ago. In the Stankeye book, without the safety net of hindsight, this signing gets the thumbs up.

If the Uribe rumors are true, it's another positive step. I had a long-standing hatred of Uribe for a long time after looking at his gawdawful hitting stats with the White Sox over the years, but after he came in and started mashing home runs for the Giants, my scowl quickly turned upside down. Uribe's deal is supposedly for one year with a club option for a second, which is just perfect. No one expects him to repeat his .824 OPS from last season, but if he completely craps out the team isn't on the hook for very long, and he's still a fine fielder. Hell, he can't be much worse than Renteria at this point.

I'm just wondering if the Giants need both of these guys. Don't they sort of fill the same role? Derosa is the better hitter, and he can fill in at several positions, and he isn't stretched as a regular. If he starts at third and pushes Pablo Sandoval to first base, where exactly does Uribe play? Unless Renteria just completely goes into the tank, I can't see him getting anywhere close to the 432 plate appearances that he got in 2009. Perhaps the Giants are keen to his limitations and don't intend to tempt fate by thinking he's got another 2009-caliber offensive season left.

I'd say it makes the most sense to give Derosa the majority of the time as the regular left fielder. First off, it monumentally improves what is now a brutal outfield situation. Second, it keeps Sandoval at third, where his bat has more value (and where his glove isn't, well, too terrible). It would also free the Giants from Eugenio Velez's Svengali-like hold on the team's brain trust. I have no idea how good of a defender Derosa is out there, but all reports say he's at least average. It would give the Giants a lineup scenario that goes something like this...

2B Sanchez
RF Schierholtz
3B Sandoval
LF Derosa
CF Rowand
C Posey
1B Ishikawa
SS Renteria

(/runs dry heaving into bathroom)

Yes, that offense still blows (and that's with me being insanely naive thinking Posey will be in there), but just picture that lineup with Velez at the top. I shudder to think. Derosa serves as an unquestionable upgrade, at a reasonable price, and it'll make the team better. There's still a long, long way to go, however.

Giants Can't Find Their Johnson

2009-12-21T22:50:00.000-08:00

So Nick Johnson won't be a Giant after all. This weekend the brittle first baseman took a one-year deal to stage a heartwarming reunion with the Yankees, where he'll DH and add to a ridiculous Bronx lineup. Johnson apparently spurned a larger offer from the Giants, and when a man takes a deal like this in lieu of more money and more security, it's clear that he just plain wants to be a Yankee. There's really not a whole lot the Giants could have done here, other than try to convince NJ that they were moving back to the Polo Grounds or something.

Johnson was seen as the sort of Holy Grail of this offseason, the relatively cheap option that would provide a quick and dirty upgrade to the team's offense. Now it's back to square one. Options like overpaying crappy Adam Laroche or giving up something of value for Dan Uggla seem unappetizing. Jason Bay, who probably wouldn't have been a good fit anyway, turned up his nose at a five-year offer. No other free agent options are both cheap and appealing. The team still refuses to give Buster Posey the time of day. What to do?

Of course, the Giants can always go down the Matt Holliday road, swallowing their pride and shoveling oodles of money at the still-unsigned free agent. If all it takes is a five-year deal, it just might make sense. The team is serious about contending now, Holliday would be relatively young and still useful over the course of the contract, and he'd be a monumental upgrade to what is now looking like a lifeless outfield situation.

Of course, the Barry Zito and Aaron Rowand albatross contracts make that difficult, and that's where we always end up, anyway, isn't it? If Holliday really is demanding an eight-year contract (as rumored), then yes, the Giants should look elsewhere, but they've got to do something. Relying on what was tantamount to an historic performance by the pitching staff to repeat itself is a fool's errand. If just one of the pitchers slips or gets hurt, this is an offense that can't make up for it. I'm sure Sabean knows this, but it's not clear where any palatable upgrade will come from (not Jack Cust...please). There's only so much more Ish we can take.

Hot Stove Yawnfest

2009-12-16T22:26:00.000-08:00

The baseball world has been abuzz with activity in the past week, with many teams making major moves involving ace pitchers, big free agent pickups, and even the obligatory asinine Kansas City player signing. Amidst all this hustle and bustle, the Giants have done...absolutely nothing. Brian Sabean hemmed and hawwed his way through the Winter Meetings with nary a new player to show for it, and now we're left with the same bad offense that we know so well, albeit now minus one player who would have probably helped. Here are some stray thoughts on the recent developments, or lack thereof, in Giants Land.

-I swear I thought the Giants would offer Ryan Garko arbitration simply because they didn't want to end up surrendering a decent prospect for two months of nothing. Many have surmised that this is a case of the front office not being able to distinguish sample size fooferah from Garko's true performance level, but I think it's just the Giants being cheap and not wanting to pony up for a guy they consider a platoon player. Not to mention, the Giants are all about defense, perhaps even taking it to an extreme, and Garko was just terrible in the field. Perhaps the non-tender is a sign they're looking to upgrade to a Nick Johnson or something.

-I'm constantly confused by this perception that a) Eugenio Velez is some kind of prospect growing into his talent and b) he's in any way adequate as a leadoff hitter. Velez is 28, and last I checked, when baseball players get to be that age, what you see is generally what you get. Also, Velez just isn't very good. His speed, which the Giants evidently love, hasn't translated into an ability to consistently get on base at the major league level.

This Velez/Andres Torres dancing bear act they have slated to start in left field has disaster written all over it. Don't get me wrong, I love Andres Torres. He can get on base and has a wonderful glove, but he ain't a regular. There's a reason he languished in the minors for the majority of the decade. Putting either of these guys at the top of the lineup is pretty much a death knell for any kind of run production. Do the Giants even realize how run-scoring works?

-The Giants signed erstwhile living Joe Posnanski punchline Tony Pena Jr. to a minor league contract, causing me to do an epic spit take. Now, when I heard this, I hadn't realized that Pena had already made the conversion from legendary offensive eunuch to budding reliever; I thought the transition was still in the rumor stages. Thus, I rolled my eyes when I heard the news, figuring here was a guy with a good defensive rep who the Giants would find way too much playing time for. Think Neifi Perez from Hell, if you can even begin to comprehend that.

In reality, the Giants signed him to give him a shot to contribute out of the bullpen. I guess it could work out, in theory. The guy has a good arm. Still, it's sad that this is the most exciting bit of Giants news right now as the baseball world is bustling with blockbuster moves. It does give me the chance to repeat my favorite Tony Pena Jr. factoid though, that in the midst of a season where he was hitting .169/.189/.209, he was for some reason intentionally walked twice.

-With the decade winding down, the trendy thing to do now is give out an All-Aughts list, so here's mine for the best Giants of the 2000s, admittedly mostly just off the top of my head.

1B J.T. Snow
2B Jeff Kent
SS Rich Aurilia
3B Pablo Sandoval
LF Barry Bonds
CF Marquis Grissom
RF Randy Winn
C Benito Santiago

SP Tim Lincecum
RP Robb Nen

Crotch-Kicking Malcontent: A.J Pierzynski
Player Inspiring Most Burned Effigies: Neifi Perez

The no-brainers here are Bonds, Kent, and Snow, though Snow gets minus points for his contrived "comeback" in 2008. Aurilia's ridiculous 2001 season and his awesome goatee help him edge Omar Vizquel, who gets docked for two truly horrible years with the bat in 2007 and 2008. Since I refuse to nominate Pedro Feliz for anything praiseworthy, we'll cheat a little and give Sandoval the nod due to his brilliant 2009. I'd love to give the honor to Bill Mueller, but he only served as the regular for one season this decade (and wasn't nearly as good as Pablo, obviously), which is kind of weird when you think about it.

Grissom leads a surprisingly uninspired group of center fielders. That will happen when you enter the century with Marvin Benard penciled in the lineup card every day. Also a bit of a surprise is Randy Winn, who was solid offensively, spectacular defensively, and edges single seasons from Ellis Burks, Reggie Sanders, Jose Cruz Jr, and Michael Tucker. Santiago's home run in the 2002 NLCS, perhaps the biggest in San Francisco Giants history, plus two solid years with the bat, give him a photo finish win over Bengie Molina.

Picking between Tim Lincecum and Jason Schmidt for best starter was a doozy, but in the end I had to go with Lincecum's two Cys and the two seasons leading the league in strikeouts. It's certainly arguable, though. Less debatable is Nen, who may be the Giants' best closer ever and literally gave his career to trying to get the Giants a title.

A Look at Giants Managers

2009-12-15T21:47:00.000-08:00

Trying to quantify how much impact a manager has on a baseball team is an endeavor that has driven many a baseball analyst into insanity's cold grasp. How much of a manager's performance is based on personnel, and how much is due to skill? How many games does a great manager win for his team over the course of a season, and how many does a moronic one lose? Are laid back managers more effective, or do dictators in spikes get more out of their teams? Is Joe Torre really a genius destined for the Hall of Fame, or was he just in the right place after Buck Schowalter made some really stupid moves in the 1995 ALDS?

I don't know the answers, but luckily Chris Jaffe of The Hardball Times has done some painstaking research into the realm of baseball managing, and has written a book detailing every manager in the history of the game who spent significant time at the helm of a team. The book hit stores today, and fortunately for me and the Stankeye readers, Jaffe himself was kind enough to send me a sort of sneak preview of the book, to share with you Giants fans.

For each manager, Jaffe has written a brief profile of their tendencies, their in-game strategies, their lineup constructions, their interaction with players, and the characteristics that their teams consistently displayed. I was given a chance to check out Jaffe's writeup of each Giants manager, from Cap Anson to Bruce Bochy, and give you Giants fans kind of a mini-preview. The excerpts include stuff on managers from the New York Giants, of course, but I figure most readers will be more interested in the managers of the San Francisco incarnation, so the bulk of my comments will focus on that. Here are some of the interesting tidbits I came across as I read through the material.

-The section on John McGraw is probably my favorite, and it goes into how McGraw was essentially an authoritarian who demanded that everybody play strictly by his rules. Think that would fly these days? He was a hardass who rarely had the benefit of having Hall of Fame players on his team, with really only Christy Matthewson and Mel Ott being bonafide all-time greats who played under his wing.

McGraw was apparently one of the great managers, if not the greatest, at developing young talent and giving unproven guys a chance. In other words, he's like the anti-Dusty Baker, and he would never be seen running a Brian Sabean-led organization. The laundry list of good players who developed under McGraw is astonishing, including more than one Hall of Famer (though most of those are in only because of the outright cronyism permeating the Veterans Committee in the '40's and '50's). Hint to Bruce Bochy: take some advice from this guy.

-Al Dark, who led the Giants to within one screaming line drive of a World Championship in 1962, and who led the A's to a title 12 years later, is portrayed as somewhat of a cipher who hadn't mastered race relations. Many of the hispanic players on the Giants despised him and Willie Mays wouldn't talk to him by the end of his tenure. To be fair, though, apparently many of the players ended up mending ways Dark in later years. In Jaffe's words, he probably gained as little respect as humanly possible for a guy who led two teams to pennants.

-Jaffe's study on Roger Craig reveals that Ozzie Smith might have Craig to thank for being a Hall of Famer. Seriously. In San Diego, Smith, despite his miserable hitting, was such a good fielder that Craig stuck with him to the bitter end when many managers wouldn't have. Craig loved defense up the middle, especially the ability of his infielders to turn a double play, and thus loved Ozzie, who may be the best defensive player ever. Smith, of course, eventually blossomed as a hitter and Craig may be the reason he got a chance as a regular at all.

Of course, we all remember Craig as the manager who helped pull the Giants out of the dark ages in the 1980's and led them to two playoff berths. According to Jaffe's research, he had quite an obsession with avoiding (and turning) double plays, and ordered more hit-and-runs than almost any manager. Having a staunch hatred of the hit-and-run play, I would probably have been driven nuts by this. Craig also coaxed career years out of many veteran pitchers (perhaps most notably our favorite announcer Mike Krukow), and must have been doing something to get his pitchers to stay in the strike zone. He's apparently the only (long-tenured) manager in history to never have any starter walk 80 batters in a season. (!)

-Ah Dusty Baker. Jaffe's argument for why Baker suddenly turned from a genius into a doofus upon leaving San Fran for Chicago is essentially due to context. Baker was in a situation in San Francisco that played to his strengths. It was a veteran-loaded team, a team that was offense-oriented, a team that had a star player who you would be crazy to screw with, and a team that had hardly any public disputes during Baker's tenure (the Kent-Bonds dugout scuffle notwithstanding).

In Chicago it was basically the exact opposite, and Baker couldn't hang. It was loaded with young players who deserved a chance, it was led by a young starting pitching staff, and it was a team made up of, according to Jaffe, a bunch of thin-skinned ninnies, as seemingly every clubhouse dispute spilled out into the media (including one ridiculous incident that resulted in a tiff with Cubs announcer Steve Stone). The Cubs situation just didn't play to Baker's strengths at all, and thus he's seen in Chicago as something akin to Mao Tse Tung.

-Regarding Felipe Alou, Jaffe asserts that the only reason Alou isn't considered a Hall of Fame manager is because of racism. You read that right. We all remember Alou as the ancient manager from 2003-2006 who often looked lost in the dugout and had an episode of epic crazy when he called Larry Kruger the "messenger of Satan" on KNBR, but it's easy to forget how highly-regarded he was when managing the Expos in the '90's. His team almost always outperformed their Pythagorean record (the 2003 Giants beat it by eight games), and he was well-liked wherever he went.

Jaffe's argument that racism cost him a plaque is based on (admittedly circumstantial) evidence taken from the fact that Alou didn't get a chance to start managing until he was in his late-50's, as baseball didn't make a push to integrate black managers until the 1990's, after Al Campanis's buffoonish remarks on Nightline. Since most managers are winding down their careers by that age, Alou probably lost a good 15-20 years of managerial service in the prime of his career, a timespan that could have cemented his standing as one of baseball's great managers.

-Two things about Bruce Bochy. One, he has a terrible--terrible--track record of developing young players, which should bring a shudder to any Giants fan hoping Buster Posey will blossom under his wing. Two, Jaffe calls him the greatest manager ever with a career losing record, which seems like a back-handed complement, but he really did get decent performances out of some Padre teams that had zero talent. He does neglect to mention how Bochy royally screwed up two games of the 1998 World Series.

I'm always a little skeptical of the many saber-books that are now becoming ever more plentiful on bookstands now, because a lot of them have a tendency to devolve into mind-numbing, uninteresting number crunching and aren't particularly well-written. A few of the BP books (not the annuals, mind you), I found nearly impossible to sit through, and some others, like J.C. Bradbury's Baseball Economist and Dayn Perry's book about winning teams, were about as insightful as reading coffee pot instructions.

However, from what Jaffe provided me here, this doesn't seem to be the case. There is a fair share of saber-talk, but it doesn't overwhelm the narrative, and if you aren't a big stat nerd, it appears you'll still get a lot out of it. The work going on at THT is some of the most interesting (and lucid) modern baseball analysis you'll see, and Jaffe's book appears to be a solid extension of that work. It's already on my Christmas list, and I'll be doubly excited if he found the time to include a writeup on Maury Wills' disastrous (and hilarious) stint as manager of the Mariners.

So Many Rumors, So Little Time!

2009-12-10T21:50:00.001-08:00

The Giants have been linked to seemingly every crappy free agent the past couple of days as the Winter Meetings have raged on, but absolutely nothing has gone through, and the Giants as of right now have made no major transactions. Judging from the caliber of player they've supposedly been coveting, perhaps we should be thankful for that fact. Here is a quick rundown of some of the more horrific possibilities that have been thrown out there.

-Miguel Olivo. The Giants "need" a catcher, so why not sign Bengie Molina's clone? On the plus side, he's got a cannon arm and is solid defensively. On the down side...everything else. A prime candidate to hit more home runs than he takes walks, and that's not a good thing. If the Giants think one year of Olivo is better than starting Posey early, methinks it's a sign that they don't know what they're doing.

-Jose Molina. I'm hoping one of the Giants' beat writers just had too much to drink one day and threw this out there just to have some fun with us. Cruel bastards. I mean, why on Earth would any team be interested in giving a major league deal to one of the worst players you'll ever see grace a baseball field?

-Mark Derosa. This isn't horrible, per se, but still unneccessary. Derosa plays six positions, has some power, and is a decent all-around hitter, which is all well and good. It's just that the 20+ home runs he hit in each of the past two seasons might up his price to where he's asking for a multi-year deal. At 34, he's the type of guy who suddenly gets old and leaves you wondering what the hell you're paying for, kind of like Aaron Rowand. No thanks.

-Scott Podsednik. Just a perfect Brian Sabean player. Short, scrappy, fast, and carrying a "gamer" reputation that masks the fact the he really sucks. In a sane world, signing him wouldn't make any sense just from a roster standpoint, but this is the Giants we're talking about. If Podsednik is brought in, it's a sign that this offseason has gone off the rails.

-Kevin Kouzmanoff. The rumor had the Giants offering Kevin Frandsen and Fred Lewis for the Kouz, but apparently the Pads turned it down. Kouzmanoff is a bad fielding, hacktastic slugger who would push Pablo Sandoval to first base, thus making him less of an asset. He's probably not worth bothering with. Lewis should be the everyday left fielder, but the Giants hate him, and the same goes for Frandsen.

-Adrian Beltre. The Giants aren't going after him, but this was my favorite little story from the Winter Meetings. In response to Sabean's stated lack of interest in Beltre, agent Scott Boras griped that the Giants should be interested in his client since they need the offense. Sabean came back by saying that if Boras is so smart, perhaps he should run his own team. The two then got into an effeminate slap-fight. Sabean should have told Boras that the fact that the Giants need offense is exactly why they aren't going after Beltre.

-Nick Johnson. He's still being linked to the Giants on a daily basis. He's the only free agent option here that makes sense, although his market value is still impossible to figure out. It looks like Ryan Garko is almost certainly going to be non-tendered, so an NJ signing definitely looks like a distinct possibility, and I'd be all for it.

From the Files of WTF?!?!: Buster Posey

2009-12-07T21:37:00.000-08:00

I took Bengie Molina's departure to mean that the Buster Posey era had begun in San Francisco, but evidently not. After a "raging debate" at the round table, the Giant front office decided that Posey isn't ready to be the every day catcher, and will be sent to AAA to start the 2010 season. Thus, the Giants will turn toward free agent options to fill their catching hole for next season. Some names that have been thrown out include Ivan Rodriguez, Henry Blanco, and, God help us, Jose Molina. This group of washed up veterans and/or ne'er-do-wells is seen as a more viable alternative to one year of an inexperienced Posey. Urge to kill...rising...

Before I consider taking up a new hobby in axe collecting, let me step back and consider two perfectly legitimate reasons why the team is not declaring Buster Posey to be their starting catcher next season. One, having already been bitten in the ass by Tim Lincecum and his oncoming nightmare arbitration case, perhaps they'll wait a month to bring Posey up and thus delay his potential "Super Two" status should he come up and immediately start playing like Johnny Bench.

This makes perfect sense, though I doubt most fans will be very patient with this penny-pinching approach. If the Giants miss the playoffs by one game because Eli Whiteside was crapping it up for a month when Posey could have been in the majors, I doubt anybody is going to want to hear Brian Sabean's excuse of getting to save a few bucks.

Second, perhaps the team has every intention of entering 2010 with Posey as their starter, but are hand-wringing in the press now because they don't want to heap too many expectations on the kid and psych him out. If that's the case, fair enough, and it actually makes some sense. Let Posey go into Spring thinking he's battling or a starting job, let him "earn" his place as the everyday catcher, and prevent him from putting too much pressure on himself under the belief that the team considers him the savior of the offense.

I can live with that. What I can't live with is the chance that the Giants legitimately don't believe that he's ready for the major leagues. Posey has had 592 plate appearances in the minor leagues, so there shall be no small sample size arguments here. In those plate appearances, he's hit .327/.421/.538, including a quick .902 OPS at AAA. We aren't talking about a guy who simply held his own, or had a nice showing or two in the minors. There isn't a debate about whether or not his bat will translate to the majors. This is a guy who blasted the ever-loving crap out of the ball at every level and has nothing else to prove. Not a bloody thing.

An argument I hear all the time is that he isn't ready to call games for major league pitchers, especially pitchers with electric stuff like those on the Giants' staff. I really doubt a pitcher's game-calling ability makes much of a difference, but, assuming that it does, my question is: even if that's true, how is stashing him at AAA going to teach him to be a major league game-caller? How does catching Kevin Pucetas and Matt Kinney for 180 innings a year prepare him for Tim Lincecum? I mean, what sense does that make? Wouldn't the best way to gain experience calling pitches for major league pitchers be to...you know...catch pitchers in the major leagues?

The Giants gave Posey a $6 million signing bonus because they thought he was a premium talent who would be a key member of a championship-caliber baseball team. This dicking around with his status on the 25-man roster is just confusing and senseless. If he's not ready now, when is he ever going to be? At 22, it's not like he's some skinny kid right out of high school who needs to grow into his talent. He's here, he's a major league player, and the Giants should just give him the catching reins and back off. If Sabean seriously thinks a year of Jose Molina is a more appetizing option than a green Posey, we need to pray there's some hidden termination clause on that contract extension he just signed.

TGIAF Ramblings

2009-12-03T22:16:00.001-08:00

Thank God it's almost Friday, which means I still have to slog through another day at work. Let's see, it's Friday eve, I've got beer at my hip, a classic 2002 NBA game between the Chris Webber-era Kings and Mavs going on NBATV, a pirated U2 concert from Las Vegas going on the iTunes (a show where they screwed up almost every song), and I'm ready to ramble about the Giants. Could life get any better right now? Well, I guess if a horny Ziva from NCIS burst through my door and savaged me. But I digress...

-I've been pondering Tim Lincecum's looming arbitration case some more in my spare time (yes, I think about these things a lot as I go about my day, sadly). A lot of fans are speculating that Lincecum might invoke an extremely rare clause in the arbitration process that allows for a player to cite a "special accomplishment" (i.e. winning the Cy Young Award) in order to compare his market value to other free agents, as opposed to other first year arb eligibles. The thinking goes that Lincecum will use this to request a $23 million figure (stacking himself up with C.C. Sabathia's record contract for a pitcher), and since the Giants have no case against his performance on the field, he'll win easily and the team will be forced to pay two pitchers around $20 million in 2010. A terrifying thought, indeed.

There are two problems I see here, though. First, the "special accomplishment" provision is a little nebulous here. It doesn't specifically state winning the Cy Young, and you can expect the Giants to nitpick this to death trying to get out of paying Lincecum an exorbitant sum. The team could theoretically argue that the provision pertains to winning a World Series MVP or the NL MVP or something regarded as more team-related, not an "individual" award like the CY. Yes, a convoluted stretch, but it gives the Giants a better argument than they have going purely against his numbers.

Second, there's just no precedent for this, at all. I think the only way Lincecum loses an arbitration case is if he submits an insanely high number, because the Giants can simply argue that no one has been awarded anywhere near this type of money in arbitration, special provision or no, in the history of the game. I'd guess that Lincecum's agent realizes this, and I really doubt that we'll see any outrageous monetary demands out of the Lincecum camp.

If I had to guess, I'd say the Giants offer Timmy $9 million (citing that it breaks Jon Papelbon's record for first-year eligible pitchers), Lincecum comes in with a request of $15 million, and the two settle at $11.5-$12 million, still comfortably shattering Ryan Howard's record for first year eligible players. Make no mistake, Lincecum is going to make a crapload of money, but it's probably not going to be the cataclysmic amount some are predicting, and I doubt this goes before an arbitration panel.

-When you follow Tim Dierkes's peerless MLB Trade Rumors site on Twitter, you stay in tune with all of the latest rumor-mongering going on around baseball. That part's awesome, but you also get exposed to terrifying reports like this, that the Giants are interested in free agent Brad Ausmus, aka every sabermetrician's idea of a bad joke. The Giants are in the market for a Crash Davis to Buster Posey's Nuke LaLoosh, so why not a guy highly regarded for his veteran savvy and genius behind the plate?

Sigh. Let's not mince words here. Ausmus is fucking terrible. He's inexplicably carved out a long career despite having no discernible talent for playing the game of baseball. Other than a total fluke last year, he's been a nothing with the bat for ten years and even his catching game has deteriorated to the point where he just isn't a major league-caliber player anymore. Unfortunately, he has a reputation that outweighs his actual on-field performance and that's been like crack to Brian Sabean in the past (think Mike Matheny or Aaron Rowand).

There were rumors that the Giants were also interested in bringing back Yorvit Torrealba, who would have some value as a backup, because at least he can still play. I'd rather the Giants throw some money at him and play him part-time with Posey than have to waste precious moments of my life watching Ausmus 60 games a year.

-Speaking of arbitration eligibles, what about Ryan Garko? Looking solely at his catastrophic half-season with the Giants, he'd seem like a prime non-tender candidate. Unfortunately, the Giants gave up a decent pitching prospect to get him, and they're probably loathe to let Garko leave after getting just two months of zero production for a quality arm.

Make no mistake, Garko was miserable with the Giants last season. He looked off balance just swinging at fastballs down the middle, and he certainly looked like a nightmare fielding his position at first base. He's not this bad, though, and since the Giants need power and patience any way they can get it, it's probably worth offering arbitration and bringing him back. He's not likely to get a substantial raise, and a Garko/Travis Ishikawa platoon scenario isn't the worst thing in the world, with Garko getting the bulk of the playing time against lefties and being spelled by the Ish late in games for defense. I can think of worse options.

-TGIAF Video before I go. This is my reaction when the news breaks that the Giants have signed Henry Blanco to be their starting catcher and will have Buster Posey start 2010 in AAA.

They Call Him Mr. Glass

2009-12-01T22:06:00.000-08:00

Well, forget my last post ever happened, because I was completely wrong about Bengie Molina being offered arbitration, as the Giants let him walk and won't bother doing the dance to try to wrangle a draft pick from him. Apparently the fear of Bengie accepting and being awarded an $8 million contract or something was too frightening a concept. The team also neglected to offer arbitration to any of their other free agents, including Juan Uribe, who I thought was the only other player the team might take a chance on.

So our favorite chubby catcher glides slowly (very slowly) off into the distance. Let's set our sights on another free agent who was (somewhat surprisingly) refused arbitration today, and who has also been linked to the Giants: Nick Johnson. Johnson has been mentioned as a possibility for the Giants to fill their offensive black hole at first base. Johnson is an OBP machine with a hint of power who would immediately come in and qualify as the team's second-best hitter. The upside is the monster 2006 season he dropped, and when he's healthy he's a genuine offensive force.

The problem is, the guy is never, ever healthy. Take it from me, a guy who has Johnson on his fantasy keeper league team, and who had to sit through two years of nothing in 2007 and 2008 while he recovered, slower than dripping glue, from various injuries. Screw hurting himself getting out of bed; Johnson breaks his wrist counting sheep in the middle of the night. The over/under on games played in a full season for him is like 80. He just cannot freaking stay on the field. I saw him dive headfirst into second base on a double last year and had to put my hands over my eyes, so sure was I that he'd come away with a dislocated shoulder or something.

Johnson's health concerns make trying to gauge his market value nigh-impossible. I have no idea what Johnson stands to get this offseason, other than to say that he's going to be marginally more expensive now that he won't cost a draft pick. Are enough teams going to be scared off due to his injury history that he'll only land a one-year deal? Is some team going to bite the bullet and give him a multi-year deal, risking throwing money into a sinkhole just to have his bat?

My guess is that he'll end up getting a two-year deal, worth around $13 million, loaded with playing time incentives. His bat is worth more than that, but the still-rough economic climate and the aforementioned injury concerns will drive down the dollars. Will the team that signs him be the Giants? Well, Johnson is a local boy (Sacramento represent!), and Bruce Bochy seems to adore him, so it's certainly not out of the realm of possibility. If anything does happen, I'm guessing it won't be until late in the offseason.

-Chris Jaffe of The Hardball Times is releasing a new book studying managers throughout baseball history and attempting to quantify (if it's even possible) how much effect they have on their team's performance. To plug his book, Jaffe is releasing excerpts on THT, and his most recent one should have a place close a Giants fan's heart, as it focuses on the career of Dusty Baker. It's a very interesting read, and focuses on the reasons Baker went from being hailed as a genius manager with the Orange and Black to being regarded as a dimwit with the Cubs.

Baker, of course, won three Manager of the Year Awards and was generally regarded as one of the best managers in the game when he was with the Giants. If you ask any Giants fan, they'll generally sing Dusty's praises when asked if they liked him. When he went to Chicago, though, things went to hell the second Steve Bartman intervened and now Baker is seen as a war criminal who ruined the careers of Mark Prior and Kerry Wood. He's now been exiled to Cincinatti, a fate worse than death, probably, where his worst sins now involve batting Wily Taveras leadoff full time.

I remember Baker very fondly, but he had some annoying traits when he was with the Giants, including his veteran fetish and an over-reliance on goofy "hunches". The one thing I found most infuriating, though, was his penchant for falling in love with bizarre pet players, and playing them way, way more and in higher-leverage situations than they ever deserved. Solomon Torres is the most obvious one, but the Baker man-crush that drove me totally nuts was with a guy named Manny Aybar in 2002.

Aybar was a crappy pitcher who had a string of like three good games down the stretch that year, and Baker decided he was integral enough to include on the playoff roster. I'm still wondering why, exactly. Against the Braves in the first round, Aybar was brought in to a bases loaded situation in a close Game 3, and threw exactly two pitches. One was lined for a run-scoring single, the other was crushed for a grand slam by Keith friggin' Lockhart. That was it for Aybar in the playoffs. He was yanked from the playoff roster after the series and was never seen again. Of all of Baker's nonsensical pet players, this guy was the most perplexing.

Bengie the Hunted

2009-11-30T22:30:00.000-08:00

When we look back on Bengie Molina's time as a Giant I think it's clear that we can safely consider him a member of the exclusive club of Good Giants. Yes, the horrid OBPs in two of his three seasons here made him much less valuable than he appeared at first glance, and his RBI totals are likely to make him extremely overrated in the view of the casual fan. Having said that, a catcher averaging 18 homers a year is nothing to sneeze at, and it also helps that he had a reputation as a lovable rolly-polly guy, even when he wasn't. So, yes, flaws and all, I think we'll all remember him pretty fondly.

Which brings us to his looming free agency. The casual fan amongst us who remembers with a tear in his eye some of Bengie's big hits and his deathly slow gait around the bases will probably want to see him back with the team for at least another year. Me? I want him outta here. He served his purpose well, but now it's time to move on to better things, namely Buster Posey. The deadline for teams to offer impending free agents arbitration is tomorrow, and the Giants have a decision as to what to do about their erstwhile glacially slow-footed catcher.

Well, to be honest, it's really no decision at all. It should be a given that the Giants will offer Bengie arbitration, then watch him decline and hit the market in search of a multi-year deal. The Giants will gladly wish him adieu, scoop up the draft picks his departure will bring forth, and install Posey as the starting catcher for 2010. The nightmare scenario where Molina accepts arbitration is unlikely because 1) he feels, however deluded he may be, that some team out there will give him a multi-year deal and 2) he'd have to accept knowing full well that he'd be part of a time share, at best, if he came back to the Giants. Since he's already stated that he doesn't want a one-year deal, this is about the safest arbitration decision possible.

I guess there is a chance that Molina will have whacked-out flashbacks to the winter of 2005, when he hit the market coming off of a solid year, only to find that the demand for his services was completely dry. He openly contemplated playing a year in the independant leagues before finally landing a low-ball one-year deal in Spring Training with Toronto. Of course, the very next winter he found a team desperate enough for a catcher to throw a three-year deal at him. Thanks, Sabes.

The fear of that sort of disinterest recurring may be enough to drive Molina to accept a possible arb offer, but again, it's not likely. While the baseball industry as a whole has gotten exponentially smarter in valuing players, I'm sure there's still a front office out there dumb enough to believe that his RBI totals are indicative of his actual value. It's highly likely that whoever does sign Bengie is going to be appearing on snarky "Worst Offseason Moves" lists.

-Just because I like to post random clips on here for no purpose other than sheer awesomeness, here is Bruce Springsteen and Tom Morello performing at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 25th Anniversary concert. When I saw it the first time, my jaw hit the floor. Two of my favorite guitarists, rocking out to a badass song.

Lincecum Enlists the Nerds For Second Cy Win

2009-11-23T21:38:00.000-08:00

Tim Lincecum won his second Cy Young last Thursday, cementing his position as a Giants legend in just his third season as a major leaguer, while also making himself a nightmare arbitration case for team management. Lincecum stands to make record dollars in his first arbitration go-round, and most deservedly so. Meanwhile, Brian Sabean and company are cringing at how much money they're going to have to fork over now that Lincecum has a near flawless arb argument.

If you're the front office, and you can't come to terms with the Lincecum camp on an amount, how in the hell do you argue your case in front of an arbitrator? "Well, sir, he was the most unhittable pitcher in the NL the past two years and he's already established himself as one of the best pitchers in Giants history...but he didn't raise the dead or bring about an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, so we can't help but conclude that he's not worth the $15 million he's asking for." Perhaps it's better to avoid the ill-will these hearings can often bring about by just giving Lincecum a pen and a contract with a blank spot where the salary figure should go, and then just walking away. Since arbitration figures are seen as market-setters, the MLBPA is probably going to be salivating like a wild dog watching Lincecum's arbitration case.

So Lincecum won his second Cy, and we Giants fans are ecstatic. It's always fun when a guy from your team gains national acclaim. The real story here, though, was the vote itself, which instantly caused a violent uproar that resulted in one of the loudest and most venomous baseball debates* you'll ever see. This Cy Young ballot was seriously the most controversial of any award vote I've ever seen, and boy was it ever fun.

*(Well, by debate I mean: "bout of childish name-calling".)

To recap: Lincecum didn't even garner the majority of the first-place votes in winning the award. That was Adam Wainwright, who earned 12 first place votes to Lincecum's 11. Of course, those votes weren't even enough to get Wainwright second place, as he finished still behind teammate Chris Carpenter. The national consensus was that this was a three-dog race between the aforementioned pitchers. To vote for anyone else would just be stupid, the common wisdom went.

Well, two "stat nerds", Keith Law and Will Carroll did just that, voting for Javier Vasquez and Dan Haren, respectively, and leaving Carpenter completely off their ballots. This immediately triggered a backlash against the two writers, as "traditionalists" accused them of ruining baseball as we know it and using their ballots to make a statement instead of an informed vote. Cardinal fans absolutely blew a gasket, accusing the two of geeking up the proceedings and purposely slighting their boys. They demanded that the pair be stripped of their voting privileges post haste. From the comments in articles such as this, you'd think Law and Carroll were Leopold and Loeb, not baseball analysts making an honest opinion in their first BBWAA vote (some asshole even tried to hunt down Law's phone number and home address...scary).

The outrage behind the vote was asinine for two reasons. First, if you're going to rail against two hardcore stat dweebs, these guys aren't it. Carroll, of course, is best known for his work at Baseball Prospectus, but his area of expertise is in the injury realm; he is not a big number cruncher. Law himself, while he used FIP and WAR to justify his vote or Vasquez, is an actual, no-foolin' scout who sits in the stands with a notepad and a radar gun and looks for the guys who can sell jeans the best (I'm not sure if he chews tobacco and carries a spitoon around with him, but if he does my respect for him just shot up a thousandfold).

The second reason the vitriol over this is so silly is because even if the two writers had put Carpenter on their ballot, he still wouldn't have won. In fact, he still wouldn't have even been close. So saying that two saber-jerks cost Carpenter anything is just idiotic. Lincecum won the award fair and square, and he didn't get any extra help from a stat nerd conspiracy. So in conclusion: who gives a shit if two writers left Carpenter off their ballots? It didn't change anything, except to possibly make a large portion of the Cardinal fanbase out to be a bunch of butt-hurt crybabies.

I did stop to consider how I would feel if Lincecum had lost because some stupid voters had given Carpenter the award because of "grittiness" or "toughness in his eyes" or something else I didn't understand or agree with (or for a ridiculously convoluted reason like Ken Rosenthal did). I would feel pretty angry. Yes, there is a large amount of homerism that comes along with these awards, and that loyalty can often intrude upon logic and common sense. So I do try my best to feel some compassion for the Cardinal fans who are wasting away so many hours in a foamy rage, plotting ways to assault Keith Law. After all, they're only showing love for their team.

Then I read stupid shit like this, and any shred of compassion runs away screaming. What a bunch of dumbasses.

Brian Wilson Serves Crow

2009-11-17T22:01:00.000-08:00

Perhaps this past season's unsung hero was the bullpen. While most viewers raved about the starting pitching and defense, and rightly so, it was the dramatic improvement in the Giant bullpen that also factored into the charge to 87 wins. It was a bullpen shrewdly constructed from bits of surprisingly effective cast-offs like Brandon Medders and Justin Miller and low-risk free agent signings like Jeremy Affeldt. For all the crap that Brian Sabean took for the Edgar Renteria signing, you've got to give the man credit for piecing this bullpen together from basically nothing.

Of course, anchoring the group was Brian Wilson, who I had voiced skepticism over before the season. In 2008, Wilson saved 41 games, which looks sexy to the unenlightened folk, but he just wasn't a very good pitcher, and I predicted he'd lose his closer job to Sergio Romo by June. Let's face it, I just didn't like him. He had that ridiculous mohawk, the obligatory flame tattoo, and he'd stalk in from the bullpen to loud heavy metal, which only works when you're Trevor Hoffman or somebody good. I figured he wasn't long for the major league world. Silly me.

Wilson, of course, had a terrific year, lowering his ERA by almost two full runs, upping his strikeout rate, and pitching ten more innings than he did the year before, many of them in higher-leverage situations. Wilson had eight saves that required him to get more than three outs, and he was utilized more often in non-save, extra inning situations, in which he performed very well (1.85 ERA in 24 innings...stay away sample-size nazis!). In 2008, he had only pitched 14 non-save innings and was atrocious.

Bruce Bochy has been criticized from all sides for a plethora of reasons, and much of the criticism is merited, but at least give him credit for using Wilson, who by now has that glittery "Closer" tag patched onto his chest, in a more creative way than your typical three-out reliever. It stands to reason that you'd want your best reliever pitching as many innings as possible (though you could argue that Jeremy Affeldt was the Giants' best out of the pen), and Bochy utilized Wilson in a role that better maximized his value.

Of course, we will probably most remember Wilson's high-profile flameouts, like the gopher ball he surrendered to Jeff Baker (one of just four homers Baker would hit all year...groan) or his blowup in Arizona the day after he was supposedly tweeting about jock douchebags in a club at one in the morning. However, his improvement across the board as a pitcher was pretty impressive, and despite his drop in save totals he was simply a more valuable pitcher. So due to all the crap I talked about his seeming impending washout and his obnoxious mohawk, this is my sad little apologia.

Cy Lincecum Deux?

2009-11-16T21:35:00.001-08:00

The National League Cy Young Award will be announced on Thursday, with our hemp-loving friend Tim Lincecum looking to defend the award he won last season. Lincecum's case this year rests in his 2.48 ERA and 176 ERA+, both good for second in the NL. He also led the league in strikeouts for the second straight year, fanning 261. For what it's worth, Lincecum's 2009 season was even better than his immaculate 2008 that brought him his first Cy. In '09, Lincecum slashed his walk rate (while maintaining exactly the same strikeout rate) and increased his ground ball rate, meaning few balls even had the chance to leave the yard.

We know how these award votes used to go, as the pitcher with the shiniest win total usually took home the hardware as more deserving pitchers with lower ERAs and whatnot hung their heads. However, it's starting to look like a lot of voters are seeing the light. Last season, Lincecum beat out Brandon Webb despite having four fewer wins. In the AL vote this season, Zach Greinke seems to be the clear favorite despite an underwhelming 16 victories, and most ESPN "experts" picked him in a mock vote (though Jon Miller voted for Justin Verlander. Come on, Jonny!).

This year, though, Lincecum has some stiff competition, and it's not just because voters are going to be googly-eyed over win totals. If he's going to lose out to someone, it'll be to one of St. Louis's two-headed monster of Adam Wainwright and Chris Carpenter, who both had excellent seasons of their own. So was Lincecum better than these guys? His relatively meager win total of 15 might still hurt him, but let's look a little deeper to see if he really does deserve to take home Cy number two.

Wainwright had 19 wins and threw a few more innings than Lincecum, but he had a higher ERA and wasn't even in Lincecum's world when it came to the strikeout ability. He just may walk away with the award because of the wins, but he shouldn't. Carpenter has Lincecum beat in both ERA and ERA+ (he led the league in both), and also had two more wins, so does that mean the deal is sealed in Carpenter's favor?

Not so fast, slick. Carpenter pitched about 30 fewer innings than Lincecum did. That might not seem like a lot, but it makes a big difference over the course of a season. Don't believe me? Check it out. Fangraphs calculates that Lincecum produced more than two whole wins better than Carpenter, and that's largely attributable to that difference in innings. Not only does Lincecum boast a big lead over Carpenter in WAR, he kicks the crap out of pretty much everybody else in the National League. That speaks volumes.

Also adding to Lincecum's argument are the strikeout totals. They aren't just pretty numbers designed to leave us cackling as the latest Dodger batter wails away feebly at another low changeup; they're very important. Essentially, if the batter isn't even able to put the ball in play, he's not going to be able to hurt you in any way, shape, or form.* He won't be reaching on any bloopers that your slow outfielder couldn't get to and he won't be legging out any infield bleeders.

Lincecum was the absolute best in the NL when it came to factors he can control, namely being simply freaking unhittable. If that isn't enough for him to ride off with his second Cy Young in his car (along with, um, other supplies), I don't really know what is.

*Yes, I am aware that he can reach on a dropped third strike, you literalist bastards, you, but my general point still stands.

You Go, Randy

2009-11-11T22:44:00.000-08:00

The Giants have politely told Randy Winn that his services won't be needed for 2010, making Winn a free agent and sending him to the scary waters of the unemployment line. Winn is surely going to get a pay cut from the $8 million he was getting yearly from the Giants, but it'd be nice to see him land on a playoff contender. Winn is the longest tenured player in MLB never to have made a playoff appearance, and it'd be a shame if he turns into the baseball equivalent of Shareef Abdur-Rahim.

Winn is lumped in a lot with Brian Sabean's other bad contracts, but was his really an egg? Over the life of the deal, from 2006-2009, Winn put up two plus years with the bat and two stinkers, but he always played terrific defense, very important for a pitching staff that relied so much on fly ball outs (Don't believe me? Go here and check out those fly ball rates). Winn's defensive brilliance most likely explains why Bruce Bochy kept pencilling him in the lineup every day when most of us were clamoring for a good benching. Don't think the Giant front office didn't take Winn's glove into consideration when they were looking for an offensive upgrade at the trade deadline.

According to Fangraphs' "WAR Dollars" (sigh...just go here), Winn was worth roughly $44 million in the four seasons of the contract extension given to him after his insane second act of 2005. He got paid $25 mil. Even if you don't follow the fancy-schmancy dollar numbers religiously, I don't see how anyone can argue that Winn wasn't worth his salary. Even when he wasn't hitting, his fielding was so good that he was still a valuable player. Obviously letting him go here is the right move, but it's worth pointing out that Winn was a pretty damn good player for the Giants when all is said and done.

As far as a replacement goes, look for more of Nate Schierholtz or Andres Torres as opposed to a substantial offensive upgrade. I'm guessing Sabean and co. realize just how important a good outfield defense (in the Giants' case, perhaps the league's best) is to this pitching staff and are loathe to mess around too much. Schierholtz and Torres are both very good fielders, so we're probably headed for some sort of platoon for those guys, or maybe a low cost, good glove free agent signing. Anyone hoping to bring in Jermaine Dye or Adam Dunn is going to be very disappointed. (Speaking of Dye, read this and then tell me if you want him anywhere near right field.)

Tim Lincecum as Jeff Spicoli

2009-11-05T22:54:00.000-08:00

Tim Lincecum today was busted for being in possession of marijuana after being pulled over for speeding in his home state of Washington. Lincecum, a long-haired, laid-back guy from the Pacific Northwest, a pot smoker? I'm shocked...shocked, I tell you!

All I can say is, what a dumbass. Going 75 in a 60 zone down those desolate Washington highways, where bored cops are just aching to nab somebody, with a bag of weed in tow and a car reeking of freshly smoked wacky tobaccy, is just begging to get nailed. Now we Giants fans have to endure Tim Lincecum pothead chants, much like we did with Barry Bonds and steroids. Thanks a lot, Timmy.

This is pretty much a non-story, outside of pure facepalm value in realizing that Lincecum could have such bad judgement. Marijuana offenses don't merit suspensions in baseball, just fines, so Lincecum won't be missing any starts. So take heart, fellow fans. Our star pitcher may have been high as shit, driving fast as hell, and possibly endangering lives, but hey, he's not going to miss a turn.

Found a Job

2009-11-04T23:52:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time, in the late-80's, I had Hensley Meulens's Upper Deck card. I had no idea if he was any good or not, but I thought his name was pretty cool, so I always remebered him. Later on, when it turned out that he really wasn't any good, I somehow came into possession of his minor league card, with him playing for the AAA affiliate of the Expos or something, a card that is now buried in a storage bin somewhere with no value whatsoever. Now Meulens is the Giants' new hitting instructor. I'm sure seven-year-old me would be blown away by this series of events.

Meulens takes over for the recently shit-canned Carney Lansford in the hopes that he can ~~turn water into wine~~ improve the Giants' hitters. Meulens is getting all the credit for supposedly being the mastermind behind John Bowker's star turn at Fresno this season, and is also being lauded for getting Eugenio Velez to be more patient (though I challenge you to look here and tell me where this reawakening took place). In taking over what was arguably the worst offense in baseball last season, Meulens has his work cut out for him, to say the least.

I'm always curious as to how much difference a hitting coach can really make. Obviously he can have guys tweak their stances or shorten their swing, but if you can't hit, then you can't hit. What is Meulens going to do, instruct Aaron Rowand to stop swinging at sliders in different time zones? Yeah, that worked so well for Carney.

One reason this move might work is that a lot of times the best managers and coaches were mediocre players in their day, simply because they essentially have a better idea of what they were doing wrong. Star players tend to make bad coaches because they were so naturally gifted and they just don't understand why the crappy utility infielder can't hit a breaking ball like they could. It's probably the reason Tommy Lasorda and Tony LaRussa and Dave Duncan made such great managers and coaches, and why Ted Williams was a miserable manager and hitting coach.

Lansford was a good hitter in his day, so maybe he just couldn't relate. Meulens was pretty bad, so maybe it follows that he'll be the next Charlie Lau. First up on his list will be to mentor Buster Posey, get Fred Lewis to cut down on his strikeouts, and leave Pablo Sandoval the hell alone. As for getting his hitters to take more walks, apparently Lansford already tried, and found the task to be positively Sysiphusian.

--The baseball season ended today in nauseating fashion with the Yankees winning it all. I was able to switch the TV off just before the last out was recorded so I didn't have to watch the Yanks celebrate. Beware in the coming weeks brainless articles arguing that baseball needs a salary cap because the evil big market team won and no one can compete with them and blah blah blah.

Where Have You Gone, Tim Alderson?

2009-11-02T22:26:00.000-08:00

As expected, the Giants brought back second baseman Freddy Sanchez, though instead of exercising his $8 million 2010 option, they're going to give him two years for $6 million per. It provides a little more payroll flexibility for 2010 as well as the knowledge that second base is going to be manned by someone reasonably competent for the forseeable future. As nice as it would be to bring in a bunch of mashers, just filling the major suck holes at most positions with league-average guys would go a long way toward improving the lineup. Sanchez theoretically fills one of those voids, although you could have said the same about Edgar Renteria last season, I guess.

Regardless of how you feel about this signing, this is a move the Giants had to make, and it was cemented the second the Giants coughed up prospect Tim Alderson in order to bring Sanchez over. You don't give up one of your better prospects for 100 largely irrelevant Freddy Sanchez at-bats down the stretch drive and get nothing else to show for it. The Giants were essentially trading for the last two months of Sanchez and the exclusive negotiating window they had with him this offseason. Trading for Sanchez was questionable in the first place (it hasn't helped that he's been an injured mess for the majority of his tenure in the Orange and Black), but re-signing him was really a no-brainer.

Next up on the re-sign docket was Juan Uribe, who decided he'd rather test the free agent waters than settle for the one-year deal the Giants were apparently offering. Look, I love what Uribe did last year, but woe be the team who lavishes him with a multi-year deal. Anyone foolish enough to not be able to see his career year for what it was probably deserves the disappointing disaster they're bound to be stuck with. I would love...love...to have Uribe back on the Giants next year, but if he wants anything more than a very cheap two-year deal, then bah!

Lastly, there are some whispers going around about a Milton Bradley-for-Aaron Rowand bad contract swap. I don't know if these rumors are legitimate or if they're just the extremely optimistic ramblings of Internet chat board dwellers, but hell, I'd be for it. Despite his status as an anger management counselor's worst nightmare, I've always liked Bradley. He can still hit, last year's horror show notwithstanding. It's just a matter of staying healthy and out if the insane asylum.

Most importantly of all, even if he stinks it up and proceeds to bludgeon an entire group of rafters in McCovery Cove with an oar, he's cheaper than Aaron Rowand, his contract runs out before Aaron Rowand's, and he's not as crappy as Aaron Rowand. With Andres Torres probably just as worthy of starting as Rowand is, it doesn't make much sense to keep carrying Rowand around if there's a deal that can be made, even if said deal involves bringing in a maniac. Again, this could be a total non-story, but keep an ear open nonetheless.

--In Giants blogger news, Nick Cannata-Bowman (whom I collaborated with for a time at Giants Cove) has started his own, brand new site called Croix De Candlestick. Add it to your reading list of Giants blogs and go check it out!

--Not for nothing, I thought I'd post a clip of a video I shot from a recent U2 concert I went to in Las Vegas, for those interested. For their current tour, the band is romping around on a gigantic stage that is supposed to represent a giant spaceship or something. We were able to get position on the field like four rows from the B stage. It was friggin' amazing. This clip I shot is the very end of a song from Achtung, Baby! called "Until the End of the World", with Bono and The Edge hopping around on these rotating catwalks that connected the main stage to the B stage. Awesome stuff. Enjoy!